


your bruises spell my name

by samssalvation



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, BUT IM GONNA MAKE IT CANON COMPLIANT, Canon Compliant, F/M, Frank Castle/Karen Page - Freeform, Gang Violence, Introspection, Karen has a lot of feelings and is dealing with that, Neither of them can move the fuck on, Post-Canon, and i guess it isn't canon compliant before (shit i can't believe i started this fic when it was), post-s2, pre-punisher s1, updates are RIDICULously unscheduled, yall just watch me and the sequel i am (too ambitiously) planning for this shit set post punisher s1
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-12
Updated: 2017-11-19
Packaged: 2018-07-14 13:34:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 35,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7173905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samssalvation/pseuds/samssalvation
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>after nearly two months apart, karen is certain she will never see frank again.<br/>of course, that all changes when her article crosses paths with his war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. one

**Author's Note:**

> (the first few chapters are mostly just karen, to let you know)

Karen was in hiding.

Well, if she was being honest, she wasn't really—she was sitting on the floor of her new apartment with a mostly-empty wine glass beside her. But since no one knew her new address and she hadn't spoken to anyone in three days, she liked to think she was in hiding; the flyers and junk mail piled outside her door helped to cement the illusion. Much better than the truth, which was that she was trying to avoid confronting the world for as long as possible.

That would be the world in which Matt was Daredevil and Frank's house had burned to the ground on Christmas Eve.

Her fingers skimmed the newspaper spread out in front of her. Despite the fact that the house burned down over a month ago, it had only started being reported by the major news outlets three days ago, once it was certain that it was the Punisher’s house and the police had gotten all the could from the place. The photograph showed the blackened wreck, a scorched lawn that Karen knew must now be covered in picket signs, hand-painted, condemning and congratulating a man that had vanished into the night. Maybe the snow had deterred some of the worst of it; the last week of January, a blizzard had hit that had stalled the city for two days and it had probably buried the wreck under a foot and a half of snow. The title of the piece—PUNISHER’S PAST GOES UP IN SMOKE—clearly showed the focus of the story: that New York would never know anything about Frank Castle beyond what they already did, because there was nothing left.

The story laid out the same “facts” that had been told a million times before, lies that Karen had read so often they had imprinted themselves across the front of her skull to read whenever she felt like she had forgotten. That hadn’t happened yet.

She skipped to the end, hoping for an answer to a question she couldn't even put into words. After a few false starts, she found the first paragraph with any new information, which, incidentally, was also the last paragraph. In cheap ink, it read:

“Police are working to determine whether the Punisher set the fire himself, or if this was just the work of one of his many critics.  As of yet, there are no leads on his location, but the police warn that he is still at large, and advises the citizens of New York to stay safe and not to panic. More information to follow as the investigation continues.”

Karen stared at those words—“not to panic”—and felt an angry fire bloom in her lungs. Panic? They were still acting like he was some sort of monster, an out-of-control killing machine that put a bullet in the head of anyone who gave him a second look. She shouldn't have been surprised. And _maybe_ she was angrier at the three little words half a sentence earlier: “still at large.”

They spelled out a truth she should have accepted the moment Frank slammed the door in the woods. She was never going to see him again.  _Still at large_. They would never catch him. If what Matt had told her was right, the only reason they'd caught him the first time was because he'd been tortured half to death and Matt had let the cops take the credit. _Still at large._ Karen hated knowing that her last image of him would be a glimpse of him on a rooftop, disappearing into the night. And that his last image of her would include the words, “You are _dead_ to me.”

Karen tore her thoughts away, trying desperately not to spiral down to the pit of defeat she had only just pulled herself out of. Her hands went to the paper, crumpling it, before she regained her composure and relinquished her hold. Slowly, she smoothed it down again, then got unsteadily to her feet and headed to her desk. She pulled open a few drawers until she found the one she was looking for, with a pair of scissors buried under a pile of wrinkled old bills. Grabbing them, she headed back to the newspaper and carefully cut out the article, slicing through her piece about rising tropical fruit prices on the back. It went directly into the folder that Karen kept in the first drawer of her bedside table, held by three elastic bands and full of other clippings—newspapers, coroner's reports, trial documents, witness statements, and a few pages of her own scrawled handwriting, trying to get down everything she could remember about him, events detailed or otherwise, conversations, ultimatums. She had kept it since they'd started on his case, then she had kept it for the article she’d never written, and now she was keeping it because it felt impossible not to. The file was seven months' worth of her life, and she couldn't find a way to stop adding to it.

She replaced the file in the drawer with its new addition shoved between an inaccurate profile of Frank and a woman's interview who claimed to have seen him standing at a street corner with a gun hidden under his coat and “murder in his eyes” (her words). Her bedside lamp flickered as she forced the drawer shut, and the bottle of sleeping pills that had been precariously set on the edge of the table fell to the floor. Karen bit back a sigh and didn’t bother to pick them up.

With the business of updating the folder done for the night, Karen rubbed at her eyes and moved to the bathroom, just as her cell started ringing. She scooped it up from where it was lying on the floor and checked the caller ID. Almost immediately, she tossed it onto her bed, where it landed face-up with Foggy’s name blinking on the screen. It was the third time he'd called today, and he always left a message, so if there was anything he really needed to talk about it, she could hear about it later.

The ringing stopped, leaving the apartment in sudden silence. Karen's deep breath sounded overly loud in her ears. The despair returned in pieces, starting with the reminder that she was alone except for Foggy and Ellison, both of whom she could barely stand to talk to after hearing about the explosion. The newspapers had taken days to figure it out. Karen had known the moment she’d heard the address. But they didn’t care. Karen knew they didn’t care, because she’d told them both.

Foggy had told her to get out of Frank’s head, to forget him. It was probably well-intended (Foggy had never really been mean to her) but it stung. Ellison had told her that if it bothered her so much she should talk to the police and write an article about it. She stared at an empty document for three hours then went home.

Over and over, she kept coming to the conclusion that she was the only person left on the planet who knew Frank like she did. His army “buddies,” if she could call them that, had turned on him, known him as a soldier first and maybe at a distant second, a father. So Ellison was right: if anyone was going to write a story about him, it damn well should be her.

But the words could never be found to describe him.

Karen pushed a shaking hand through her hair, fingernails digging into her scalp as though she could rip the thoughts from her head. God, she wished! Rip out every memory of Frank Castle, every smile and every grimace and every second that had made her realize he was just a shattered reflection of herself, just a human painted in monster’s colors. All the memories did now was torment her whenever she found herself thinking of nothing.

The sound of a car starting in the street below brought Karen back to the present, and she tried to shake off the cloud above her head. She kept telling herself that she had lived through worse and it didn’t seem to be working.

She snatched her towel from where she had hung it to dry on her closet door and headed into the bathroom. The light over the spotted mirror blinked to life, producing a high-pitched whine just at the edge of Karen’s hearing, but once she reached up to knock it straight it stopped. The light lied to her, made her look warmer than she really was in its yellow-orange glow.

Her towel fell to the cool tiles beneath her feet as she eyed her reflection. Her blue eyes were tinged with red from unshed tears—she squeezed them shut and a few welled over, slipping down her cheek as though escaping in the fastest way possible, dropping to the floor.

If only she could escape. In a matter of a few short months, her entire life, that she had worked so hard to create, had collapsed like a house of cards.

The side of her fist slammed into the white laminate counter, and she glared down at the sink like she could somehow shift the blame to the drain. “Come on, Karen. You can pull yourself together.”

 _Bullshit_.

The word resonated in her skull, but it wasn’t her voice. It was another, one far lower, scratched and cracked and beaten, pushing out the single derisive word: _bullshit_. The smell of coffee was suddenly strong in her nose, the clink of scratched ceramic on a chipped saucer seemed to echo in the bowl of the sink, the counter became a sticky diner table beneath her fingers.

The light started keening again. Her hand knocked it straight. The moment was over.

After forcing her mind to task, she got through her routine, running a dry brush over her teeth with some cold water (she had run out of toothpaste yesterday and hadn’t wanted to go out to get some more), and stripped off her clothes before stepping into the shower and pulling the plastic curtain shut. The water shot out of the showerhead, icy at first, then warmer. It took Karen a few minutes to drop her arms to her side from where they had been crossed defensively over her chest. She watched as the water ran in streams from each fingertip, splaying them and letting them fall limp to watch the patterns they traced out in the air.

It took a little while longer before Karen felt like she finally had the strength to start washing up. Her fingers pressed shampoo into her head harder than necessary, like if she pressed hard enough it would clean even deeper, scrub free the memories and the pain and the overwhelming, undirected sadness she felt but couldn’t act on. Over the pounding of the water, she could have sworn she heard her cell ringing again. Another portion of friendly concern from Foggy, another message to be recorded by a machine. It was probably working better than Karen was working at the moment anyways, better to leave the message with it.

That thought, so passive and defeatist, was the first thing to cleave through the fog wrapped around Karen’s mind. That thought annoyed her. No, it _angered_ her.

Karen stepped out of the stream of water, the cooler air working on her. The wine and the isolation and the fixation were all culminating in some sort of self-directed attack, which she had allowed for three days. Well, three days had been more than enough. She was done feeling sorry for herself.

She shut off the shower abruptly and tossed back the curtain. With a few short motions, she wrung out most of the water from her hair, then grabbed her towel and headed back to her room. The notification light was blinking on her phone. She took a seat on her bed, towel now wrapped firmly around her, and put the phone to her ear.

Three messages. The first, from Foggy early yesterday morning, she had already heard. She moved to the next.

“Karen? You can’t keep avoiding me. Please let me help. It sounds crazy, but I know what you’re going through, and I don’t want you to think that you’re alone in this. Because you’re not. You’ve got me. (There was a long pause in his message, and, knowing Foggy, it was devoted to making the decision to tack on another piece of information a moment later.) I’m going to be at Pete’s Diner for breakfast on Friday before a late meeting, around eight. Maybe I’ll see you there.”

The third message began a moment later, but instead of hearing another set of Foggy’s platitudes, there was a staticky silence, that persisted only a few seconds before the phone beeped, signalling the end of her voicemails. Karen pulled the phone from her ear, noting the timestamp on the Foggy’s message. Before she got in the shower. She looked at her missed calls. Foggy, Foggy, Foggy, Foggy . . . and right at the top, an unknown number.

Her thumb hovered over the number for a second, then pressed it and put the phone to her ear again. It rang a few times before the ringing stopped—someone had answered, but no one spoke. After a short hesitation, Karen asked in a voice steadier than she felt, “Who is this?”

A soft breath, a clatter, and then her screen blinked red: _call ended_.

Karen’s heart thundered in her chest. Some more rational corner of her brain told her not to jump to conclusions—she had gotten anonymous phone calls before, some which eventually ended in tips or information about cases. Hell, when she’d just started investigating Frank, she had left more than a few uncertain messages with anyone she thought might be able to shed some light, and sometimes she hadn’t been able to find anything to say when the voicemail picked her up. This could be any number of informants or maybe just a wrong number, or a hundred other explanations that were equally, if not more plausible than the answer the rest of her tired mind jumped to.

 _Frank_.

She had no way to confirm her suspicions aside from the cool anxious sweat that had broken out on her forehead and the pulse jumping in her wrist, but it felt like more than enough.

Against reason, she suddenly felt more at ease. Letting her arms go loose at her sides, she fell back on her comforter. She ignored the obvious questions rising at the back of her mind: _If it was Frank, why was he calling? Why didn’t he say anything when you picked up? Why now?_ She knew that if she tried to answer them, she would eventually talk herself out of it, and she didn’t want to break the calm that had come over her, even if it was a false one.

She took in three breaths, each heavier than the last, feeling her heart rate return to normal, and then snapped herself back to business. The digital clock on her bedside table told her it was nearing midnight. It took a few seconds for her to finish drying herself off and get into an old tee for bed.

She grabbed her phone and climbed under the covers as she dialed Foggy’s number. He must have been asleep already, since it was apparently her turn to catch the answering machine. She didn’t bother to leave a message; he would know what her missed call had been about, and if he had any doubts, he would see her on Friday.

A moment later, she turned out her light and placed her phone on the table beside her. The darkness pressed against her, lulling her towards sleep, and when she closed her eyes, she was in the dark somewhere else; a seemingly endless forest, ringing with the sound of a single shot.

Karen rolled onto her side, opening her eyes again. Her bottle of sleeping pills was on the floor where she had let it fall. They were the only things that stopped the nightmares. All of them seemed to involve either Frank or Matt, both looming black silhouettes with bloody knuckles, both pushing her away. But tonight . . . tonight Karen wanted to see him. The one whose voice was always in her head.

Yes, Karen thought as she rolled back to face the ceiling. Tonight she would let herself dream of Frank.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading! i don't know when the next update will be (though i have other chapters written). maybe follow/bookmark for updates? and of course, if you liked it, please feel free to drop a kudos or a comment (or both)!!
> 
> (@calicosjack on tumblr)


	2. two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> karen gets reminded of her job, and tries to let go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there was originally another chapter before this one that detailed her conversation with foggy. it was boring.

Breakfast at Pete’s Diner went about as well as Karen had thought; she’d argued with Foggy over who had a worse boss (mostly in fun), bonded over their mutual distance from Matt (who Foggy had apparently not seen in weeks), and basically avoided talking about Frank or any of his many forms. He was looking good—a new suit, one that hadn’t come off the rack, as well as a new haircut. Karen tried very hard not to be jealous, and succeeded when he rushed out of the diner ten minutes late to a meeting with a very important client.

While disjointed, their meeting had calmed her nerves. She chalked the disjoint up to the fact that they hadn’t had a real conversation in a week or two. In practice, a friendship between two people with wildly different schedules and habits was far more difficult to maintain than either of them had thought. Even still, she was really starting to feel like herself again.

Well, almost herself; she still couldn’t find a real story. The last few ones she’d brought in had been boring pieces about the rising costs of  _ insert item here _ , the last one having been tropical fruit, and the one she came up with on the way to work being the rising cost of road repairs.

Now, exactly one week later, Karen found out the rising cost of writing boring articles.

She stood in front of Ellison's desk as he opened up the email she'd sent him. The whir of computers and conversation was muted by the closed door between them and the rest of the office, but Karen could see colorful silhouettes moving about behind the rippled glass of Ellison's windows. The clock on the wall to her right read five after five, which explained the increase in noise as everyone went for their coats and broke into conversation. She pulled her eyes away from them to the editor, who already looked dubious due to the smiley face Karen had put as the email’s subject line—a preemptive attempt to lighten his mood, and clearly a failed one. He took off his glasses momentarily to rub at his eyes before clicking on the file.

She watched as his eyes skimmed the title, then the first paragraph, without comment. A second later, clearly not having read the article in full, he sat back in his chair with his arms folded across his chest and fixed her with an unreadable look.

Karen stared at him, not speaking until she knew his point of attack. Because an attack was coming. He didn't look happy.

“What the hell did I just read, Page?”

She swallowed tightly but didn't let it show. Instead, she cleared her throat and pointed at his screen. “I think the title says it—"

“Cut the shit.” 

She shut her mouth. Her coasting time had clearly come to an end.

When she didn't say anything, Ellison raised his eyebrows and said, “Well?”

“I'll write a better article.”

“Yeah? About what? Because if I see another article about the cost of mangoes or pineapples or whatever that shit was two weeks ago I'm going to shoot myself. And maybe you too. I hired you to write about the risky stuff, Page, the stuff that involves  _ real  _ journalism. Not Google and a spreadsheet.” He visibly held back a sigh as he leaned forward to close her piece. When he spoke again, his tone wasn't as harsh. “It's been nearly two months.”

Karen bit the inside of her cheek and feigned innocence. “Two months since what?”

Ellison narrowed his eyes. “I thought I told you to cut the shit. We both know what I'm talking about. That thing with the Punisher's house burning down. We covered it, it's done, get over it.”

Karen could have protested, but he was right. She remained silent; Ellison looked like he had more to say.

A moment later, he continued. “Are you scared?”

The question caught her off-guard. “Scared?”

“Of finding out that he's really gone. Because that's the only explanation I can think of that would make you stop looking for a real story. That, or you're afraid you'll find another Frank Castle, and you'll get too caught up in his mess to write about him either.” Karen's stunned look seemed to have no effect on him. Sardonically, he added, “What do I know, I'm just a newspaper editor who apparently has a bad choice in hires.”

“I'm not scared.”

“Then what is it?”

“I don't know.” But she did. She hadn't put the thought into words before, that was all. The only thing she'd needed was a kick in the head—provided, probably by accident, by Ellison. A kick that made all the little pent-up pieces of anger and worry she’d been storing up since she’d put it all away nearly two weeks ago fall back into place. Karen sucked in a deep breath, which shakily trickled back out. She met his eyes for the first time in the meeting. Knowing fully well that it would annoy him, she asked firmly, “What if he's not really gone?”

Ellison let his head fall back, letting a long breath out through his nose. “You're killing me.”

“Okay, but listen, all those other times we thought he'd disappeared and he always came back, I mean, who says he's not doing that again? What if—"

“You're writing me what-if articles now? That's speculative fiction, Karen.” He paused, then added sharply, “And what is 'all those other times’ supposed to mean? He escaped from prison, then he narrowly escaped death, and you're acting like that's a pattern.”

“He was there the night I was kidnapped. On the roof of another building. I saw him. And I already told you, he was there when I talked to the Colonel.” She had never elaborated on the details of that meeting, but she suspected Ellison had at least guessed there was far more to the story than she had told him.

The lack of details on both claims clearly didn't sit well with him. “Can anyone corroborate your story? Because any reporter worth their salt could rip a hole right through that claim if it's just you, a.k.a. the recently-kidnapped ex-legal-assistant who was probably in shock at the time.  _ And  _ the Colonel has officially been missing for weeks, so I'm going to have to guess that Castle killed him, which is just another murder charge to put against him.” Noting the color rising in Karen's cheeks, he went on. “Look. I want to believe you, and I think you think you saw him. But your history with Castle and the situations you keep meeting him in really detract from your credibility. Nothing against you. Those are just the facts of this business.”

“I wasn’t going to write about it. I’m just saying—"

“Saying what, Karen?” Impatience tinged his words. “This is an office. We run a newspaper. To run it, we need articles to fill it, and that’s why you’re here. Not to sit around questioning Frank Castle’s motives, or wait for what you think is his inevitable return.”

Karen wanted to protest, but he was right. She ducked her head a little, as though it would lessen the force of his heavy gaze.

The space between them filled with silence as both contemplated what had just been said. After what felt like an eternity, Ellison leaned back. His chair squeaked. “Castle has clearly moved on with his life, whatever kind of life that is. And unless something has changed, it’s a life you don’t want to be a part of. You need to accept that you’re better off with him gone.”

“I know that,” Karen said quietly.

“Then you know what you have to do.”

She looked up at him questioningly.

“Burn the file.”

Startled, Karen immediately began spluttering excuses. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, I got rid of—"

“No, you didn’t. Your office is filled with files for cases you only looked at once, and Castle was a lot more than that. So I know you have a file for him somewhere, and you need to get rid of it. It’s the only way to break your vicious cycle.” He repositioned his glasses. “It’s for the best.”

Karen took a second to absorb his order. She didn’t want to give up hope . . . hope for what? Hope that Frank would come barging through her door followed by a shower of bullets? Hope that he’d appear beaten and bloody only to use her as bait? If she looked at their past with any degree of detachment, it was so painfully obvious that he wasn’t good for her. At this point, he probably wasn’t good for anybody. She felt the sting of tears in her eyes, but she blinked them back.

Slowly, she nodded. “I’ll burn it.”

“Good. And after that, you can hit the street and get me a real story. No more of this mango shit.”

Karen laughed, though the sound was slightly choked. She grabbed her jacket from the chair she’d placed it on when she’d come in and let out a long, steadying breath. “Sure thing, boss.”

“Now get out of here.”

She didn’t need to be told twice. Soon she was on the road home, driving with the windows down so the frigid winter air could clear her mind.

God! She was an idiot. She kept waiting and waiting for something that would never happen, something she shouldn’t even want to happen, like it would be any different than before. Like her life wouldn’t instantly be in danger the moment she even saw him again. Karen had just been too sure of herself to listen to those warning her off, namely Ellison and Foggy. And, really, Frank himself. Besides, he still thought she was in love with Matt after their conversation in the diner - 

Karen started. Where had that thought come from? What did it even matter what he thought her relationship with Matt was?

Through conscious effort, she pushed the thought entirely from her head and turned her focus solely to the road, which had grown icy once the sun set. But her thoughts kept turning in the back of her mind. By the time she reached her apartment, she had reaffirmed her decision to burn the folder about a hundred times, each time more certain the last. It was the only way she could start moving on.

After a haphazard parking job, she hurried from her car to the warmth of her building. As she climbed the stairs towards her apartment, she fumbled with icy fingers for her keys—then froze. The sound of footsteps  She could have sworn she heard them coming from inside her apartment.

Cautiously, she pressed her ear up to the wood, straining her ears to try to pick out another sound. There was nothing. Nothing . . . and then, the creak of her floorboards.

She hurried to unlock the door, but her fingers were still numb from the cold; the keys clattered loudly to the floor. She lunged for them. There was a second of frantically picking through them until she finally found the right one and unlocked the door. It slammed open.

And the apartment was empty.

Karen’s breath caught as she stepped in. Her eyes flitted over the bed, the open closet doors, the dark bathroom, hoping to catch a flicker of motion to prove her right. She clutched her keys in her hand, ready to attack, but as she hit the lightswitch to her right, it was clear she was truly alone. Her throat was tight; she swallowed a few times to try and ease it, but it didn't help much. 

A motion from the corner of her eye caught her attention all of a sudden: the curtains shifted, moved by an imperceptible breeze. She kicked the door shut and strode to the window. Her fingers ran along the frame, feeling around until they found cooler air. Getting closer, she could see there was a thin sliver of space between the window and its frame, whistling quietly as the wind blew over it.

Karen felt her heart plummet into her shoes. She hadn’t opened that window since she’d moved in. Which meant - 

“Someone was in here.” She had to say the words aloud to make them real. If she said them aloud, it meant it wasn’t just her desperate imagination searching for something,  _ anything _ to cling to in order to prove that Frank Castle was still around. She said it again for good measure.

Carefully, she drew back the curtains just enough to see the street below. Quiet, snowy, still— _ maybe she had opened the window and forgotten, maybe it hadn’t been fully closed when she moved in— _ and the snow piled on her window sill was packed. It could be a footprint. It could also left from a cluster of pigeons. Inconclusive.

She let the curtain fall and faced the apartment. Her heart raced in her chest and her ears; if someone had really been in her apartment, there had to be another sign. One last, single thing out of place that could prove it to herself. But the carpet was clean (or as clean as it had ever been), her computer was still tucked under her bed and the charging cord was still bundled on top, and all the drawers in her dresser were shut tight.

A heavy weight settled over her chest. Her knees felt weak, so she stumbled to her bed before they could give out. She heard Ellison’s voice in her ears:  _ You need to accept that you’re better off with him gone. _

She rubbed a hand over her face, her fingers warm against her cheeks as the numbness faded into pins and needles. Five seconds, and she would do it. She would burn that file and be done with Frank Castle forever.

She counted out loud: “Five. Four. Three. Two.”

Her heart caught in her throat. She squeezed her eyes shut and balled her fists in the comforter. “One.”

She forced herself to her feet and over to her bedside table. The drawer stuck as she yanked it open, so she had to wrench the folder out, and a few papers spilled out before she could catch them. She frowned, peering at the folder. Where was the third elastic band?

Now that the folder was out, she could pull out the drawer all the way, but it was empty. No elastic. Her eyes went to the floor. _There_ —just under her bed. A snapped, blue elastic band. Setting the folder on her bed, Karen crouched to pick up the elastic, her mind working furiously.

There were two possible explanations: one, Frank  _ had _ been in here, and he hadn’t noticed the elastic snap when he’d pulled out the folder, or two, in wrestling the folder out, the elastic had snapped, and  _ she _ hadn’t noticed the elastic snap. The first scenario assumed that Frank both knew where the folder was, that she kept a folder at all, and that somehow he hadn’t noticed that he had put the folder back with two instead of three elastics. Highly unlikely. It was far more probable that she hadn’t been paying attention and the ancient elastic had come to the end of its life when she had pulled on it too hard.

She stared at the band, mouth dry.  _ Choose _ .  _ Choose your truth. _

Her eyes moved up to the rest of the apartment. Untouched, unchanged, undisturbed. She had wanted one thing that could prove it to herself, but this wasn’t it, not really. This wasn’t enough. It couldn’t be enough, not if she wanted to turn the page and move onto the next chapter of her life.

Her lips parted. She stood, then grabbed the folder and stalked over to the kitchen sink and pulled up the metal garbage can from the cupboard beneath it. She had to crumple the folder a little to fit it all in, and it took nearly five minutes to find the lighter fluid she knew she’d bought a while back tucked in behind the old plastic bags by the stove, but soon the papers were soaked in fluid and she was holding a match.

It took a few tries to light it. Her gaze caught on the small flame. “Goodbye, Frank,” she whispered.

The match fell.

Once the fire caught, she put the garbage can in the sink and unhooked the flame detector from her ceiling, then started water boiling for pasta and kicked off her heels. The smell of burning was acrid on her tongue; she cracked the window in earnest, and dropped the glowing ashes onto the empty sidewalk below, then walked back to the stove, leaving the window open to air out the smoke.

In the street, a lone car started and pulled away into the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading chapter two everyone! no one has commented yet (sob) but maybe if you enjoyed this chapter you could remedy that?  
> i'm so needy omg


	3. three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> karen gets a tip, and everyone guesses wrong.

Karen slumped further down into her swivel chair and selected the next recording on her phone. Her voice came out of her phone speakers, muffled by the coat pocket it had been when she’d made the recording, and she let her mind wander for a moment.

She had spent the entire weekend hunting down informants - and by informants, she really meant people she knew because of Nelson and Murdock who had an ear to the ground, and ones she really shouldn’t be contacting at that, because she was officially in breach of client confidentiality. Or at least she was fairly certain she was, but with Nelson and Murdock out of business, most of them wouldn’t be able to find a lawyer to press charges anyway.

After a collected seventeen hours on the street, she had come away with little to show for it. One thing that everyone seemed to be saying, though, was that there was a new organization causing trouble in and around Hell’s Kitchen. Karen had resisted the urge to demand, “When is there not?” every time someone said it, but she always thanked them for their help and moved along instead. She couldn’t risk alienating them - though, with the information they were currently supplying, it didn’t seem to be that much of a risk at the moment.

Her voice on the recording cut off. There was a pause filled with staticky silence, then a woman’s voice cracked and broken by sixty years of cigarettes murmured, “They say there’s a new crew making a mess of shit around here.”

Karen’s sigh was audible through the speakers.

She pinched the bridge of her nose to keep her temper from boiling over. When she had promised Ellison a better story, she had thought she could find at least one abuse case, one missing child, one assault that she could write a real article about. But as of yet, all the major assault and abuse cases were already being handled by journalists more competent and experienced than herself, and her search for missing children still hadn’t come back from the police.

She glanced at her phone. There were still four minutes left of the recording, but she remembered the interview. She had been sitting in a moth-eaten couch - and yes, _in_ was the more accurate term, since there probably wasn’t a single spring left in it, and she’d practically sunk to the floor - and the woman she’d been interviewing had been wearing four sweaters and had complained about the poor heating while there were at least three windows open that Karen could see. Needless to say, she hadn’t expected much going in, and she hadn’t gotten much in return.

She stopped the recording, cutting into the woman’s wildly racist discussion of the “suspicious black man” living below her (even though her apartment was on the bottom floor) and tossed her phone into one of her desk drawers.

“Why the fuck did I become a journalist?” she muttered as she stood and stretched, feeling her back crack. She had already written her one-off column this week (as she did every week), this time about how the old Barley Mow Pub had recently closed last month after a seventy-seven year run. She always wrote bit pieces about what was going on in the community - it was how she got paid, and it was what Ellison expected to fill the time between real stories. But he had said so himself, he hadn’t hired her for the bit pieces that paid the rent, and he hadn’t hired her for her previous attempts at full-page, _front_ page articles (a.k.a. the “rising cost” series). They had been shoved in middle, glanced at, recycled. She needed a framer, like the front pages that were hung around the office. The Battle of NY. Daredevil Collars Fisk. The Trial of the Century.

Currently, her headline was: “New Gang May Be Making Mess of Shit.”

She looked out her window. Manhattan spread out before her. While she couldn’t help but love the city, it was full of shitty people and shitty things. _So why couldn’t she find one shitty story?_

She was so far up the creek that she was genuinely considering going to Matt’s on the off chance that he was actually there and demand he let her tag along on one of his damaged-soul repentance-fueled death missions (in Foggy’s words).

A knock at her door startled her from her last-ditch thoughts. She turned. “Come in.”

Ellison pushed his head in, looking first to her desk, then scanning the room until he saw her by the windows. He jerked his head to motion her forward. “Those files you asked for came. I don’t know how you got them to give them to you.”

“I’ve got some friends on the force.”

“I’ve been in this business for thirty years, and even I don’t get full case files.”

Karen grinned and started towards the door. Ellison stepped back into the hall to let her out. “They’re only on loan. I’m under strict command not to make any copies.”

He scoffed. “And I’m sure you’re going to stick to that.”

“When have I ever done something that went against the wishes of the police?” Karen headed out to the bullpen, hearing Ellison chuckle behind her. She searched the room until she saw Brett Mahoney by the front desk, and strode towards him, raising her hand to get his attention over the daily bustle of the office.

He smiled as she neared him. “Even without Nelson or Murdock around, you still head for the gloomy cases.”

“That’s what I’m here for, Sergeant.” She gestured at the box on the front desk, which was almost completely filled with brown case files. “That’s all of them?”

“This is what’s happened in the last month.”

Karen looked at the box again, eyes widening. “Is that normal?”

Mahoney glanced around, as though someone might overhear their conversation above the whir of printers, the computer response blips, and general office chatter. He lowered his voice and leaned closer to say, “They’ve spiked, but we haven’t gotten any leads on why. And I think it’s safe to say I’ve already said too much. But, hey, if you get any leads - “

“I’ll come directly to the professionals,” Karen lied.

He gave her a look that said he didn’t believe her. He blew out his cheeks and shook his head. “Okay, I’m going to try that again: when you need backup, give us a call.”

She laughed, then grabbed the box of cases, surprised by its weight. “Don’t worry, I’ve got you on speed dial.”

“Everyone has 911 on their speed dial, Karen.”

Karen didn’t touch that one. She started back to her office, balancing the heavy box on her hip and feeling off-balance in her heels. “Thanks for the files, Brett.”

“Just stay out of trouble, okay?”

“That’s my motto,” she tossed back, and nearly toppled over when she ran into Ellison. Brett looked on with something like amusement before he murmured a goodbye to the receptionist and left.

Karen clutched the box close to her chest as Ellison reached over to grab a file. “These are mine, back off.”

He raised his eyebrows. “I’m your boss.”

“Yes, and you can read my article when it’s done.” Now having readjusted her balance enough to keep moving, she deftly dodged his outstretched arm and started clicking her way back to her office.

“It better knock my socks off, then,” he called after her.

“Don’t they always?”

She pushed the door shut with her hip before she could hear his undoubtedly negative response. Now safely out of view, she kicked her shoes off, then padded stocking-footed over to her desk and set the box down with a sigh of relief. The stack of files within it looked menacing, especially considering their contents, and she tried not to be overly happy that she had them. She wondered if she would have been more affected a few months ago, before things had ended with Frank, before she’d been working for Ellison.

It wasn’t important; she had her case. Somewhere in here, there was a story, and she was going to write the ending.

She started unloading the files, glancing at the names on the files as she built a stack about ten files high on her desk. They were hefty; clearly she was going to have to break the contents of the box down piecemeal. The box was then shifted from on top of her desk to under it, and she sat down to work.

She pulled the first file over across the desk. The motion disturbed a slip of paper, which fluttered to the ground. Brow furrowed, Karen bent to scoop it up. She unfolded it and felt her throat close up. This wasn’t her handwriting.

_Los cangrejos. Trafficking. Bar._

She stared at the four words for what felt like forever. Obviously it was some sort of tip, but the words were hardly easy to decipher in terms of meaning. Setting the folder aside, she started chipping away at interpreting the message.

Los cangrejos. That was Spanish for crabs. Did it mean . . . trafficking crabs? No one would call illegal crab trade _trafficking_ , though. That couldn’t be it. She narrowed her eyes, trying to pick apart the script. Was the C capitalized? It was difficult to tell. If it was . . . maybe it was a name. Not just _crabs,_ but _the Crabs_. The new group “making a mess of shit,” maybe?

If that was true, then “trafficking” had to refer to something else. Drugs? Organs? Her eyes slid from the paper to the files piled on her desk. A spike, Brett had said. A spike in child disappearances over the last month. _Child trafficking_.

Then the last word. Bar. Karen must have wracked her brain for a solid hour on that three-letter word, skimming the case files, looking up local bars, doubting herself _again_ and considering that maybe it was a bar that served and trafficked crabs, but that didn’t feel right.

She was so caught up in trying to figure out what the message meant that it was lunch by the time she realized she had an even bigger problem: how did it get there? She had been standing by the doors talking to Brett the entire time she’d been away from her desk. If anyone suspicious had come in, she would have seen it. Brett definitely would have. Her eyes went to her window, but it didn’t open. There was one door, and someone had to have used it to put the note on her desk.

She rose from her chair and tried to remember if they had any cameras in the office itself. The woman whose desk was just outside her office, what was her name? Therese? She wasn’t sure. Maybe she had seen something. She popped her head out her office door and said, “Hey!” in a way that was hopefully not as stressed as she felt until she got the woman’s attention.

“Did you see anyone come in here when I was gone?”

“You were gone?”

Karen blinked. That was all the answer she needed. “Thanks, never mind.”

She was about to close the door when she spotted a security camera by the front doors. Ellison might have a way to access it. Instead of slinking back to her desk, she headed to his office and knocked, paper still in her hand.

“Yeah.”

She went in. He was eating a ham sandwich at his desk. “Can you access the security camera footage?”

He gave her an odd look. “For the office? Why?”

Karen brandished the paper like a weapon. “This message was left on my desk when I went with you to pick up the missing children cases. I need to know who put it there.”

“Why does it matter?”

The comment came out of left field. “What?”

He sighed and put down his sandwich, evidently put off it by her questions. “Karen, you got an anonymous tip. Congratulations. I’ve had a few turn up in similar ways, and let me tell you, knowing who put it there never helped any. Sometimes, it actually made things worse.”

“It doesn’t bother you that there was someone in this office and you didn’t know about it?” Karen’s voice was pitched high with disbelief.

“The tip was delivered. The reason it came as an anonymous one is probably because that information could get someone in serious trouble.” When she continued to look shocked, he reeled back with a groan and pushed himself out of his chair to come around the desk. He put his hand out. “Show me the tip.”

She gave it over and watched him skim it. He made a dubious face. “This is it?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Karen, it’s barely a tip, and you want to hunt down whoever sent it?” He handed it back to her and put his hand on her shoulder. “Use it and move on.”

“But - “

“Is this really about the anonymous tip-off, or is this about you hoping this tip came from someone in particular?” He interrupted her protest with a meaningful look, and it only took a second for her to catch his drift.

She shook her head. “I burned the file. I’m done with that.”

“ _Then move on_.” He stepped back and around his desk to his chair. A moment later, he was eating his sandwich again. “You have to learn to go with the flow, Page. You always fight it.”

“Thanks, Yoda.”

“That was hardly Yoda.” Ellison gave her a disparaging glance. “If I was doing Yoda, I’d do the voice for it too.”

It was a clear dismissal. She folded the tip up again and headed back to her office. Maybe she should call Foggy to talk to him about it. She didn’t know why, but not knowing the source of the tip didn’t sit easy with her. And _not_ for the reason Ellison had said.

After shutting the door quietly behind her, she grabbed her phone from where she’d stowed it that morning and dialed him. She glanced at the clock on her dash to see it was just after twelve. He should be at lunch.

It took five rings for him to pick up. “What?”

“Hello to you too.”

There was a puff of breath on the other end of the line. “Sorry, I’m going to lunch with a client and I don’t want to be late.”

Karen deflated a little. “Oh, I don’t want to make you late. It’s not a big deal. We can talk later.”

“No, we can talk now, just only for the next five minutes until I find the restaurant.” His speech was full of pauses, probably trying to read directions as he walked. “What’s up?”

“I got an anonymous tip today at work.”

“That’s cool. Did it help you on a case?” The question was followed by a honk and Foggy’s tinny cursing.

He didn’t seem to be getting the point. “I don’t know who brought it.”

“That’s what anonymous means, yes.”

Karen gritted her teeth. “Thanks. What I meant was, I have a weird feeling about it. And I want to know who brought it - “

“Wait, do you think Frank gave it to you?”

She huffed angrily. “Why do you both think that I think that?”

“Hm?” He had probably pulled the phone away from his ear as he dodged what sounded like an angry cyclist to Karen’s ears. “I don’t think it’s him, Karen. I think he’s gone.”

“So do I. _I don’t think it’s Frank_.”

“Then what’s the big deal?” Before she could answer, he added, “Oh, I found it! Gotta go. We’ll talk later.”

Karen let the phone fall to her lap and muffled a frustrated groan. All this time spent telling her to move on, and now they were the ones bringing him up. She hadn’t thought it was him. She burned the folder, right? She moved on. She’d done her part.

 _But . . . what if it_ was _Frank?_

She smacked the idea down the moment it rose in her mind. Of course it wasn’t Frank. Because Frank was _gone_.

She tucked the tip into her pen cup and spun her chair. Use it and move on. Alright. She’d used it as much as she could at the moment, so that left only moving on. Stifling the last of her worries about the tip, she turned to the first file in her stack and started reading.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so i guess whining about a lack of comments worked? thank you to everyone who commented on the last chapter! you're all so sweet (and patient). i promise interesting stuff happens next chapter!  
> also, if i take a while to reply to comments, don't worry, i've probably read the comment a thousand times over and always got too flustered to reply.  
> hope you liked the chapter!


	4. four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> karen hits a snag, and goes out for a drink.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a day late! shock, horror! hopefully this won't happen too often (unless i plan on doing it and i let you know before hand) but it's been a busy week and i really wanted to write up another chapter before posting this one, so there we go.  
> fun stuff this chapter, guys!  
> (i mean, i guess it depends on your definition of the word)  
> also, thanks to tacohead13 on good ole tumblr.com for beta-ing!

It took Karen a week to sift through all the cases and chart them out on a faded fold-out map of Manhattan on her office floor. The moment she finished, she proceeded to sit herself down and try to find the epicenter of the spread of red pins, which wasn’t easy. To look at it, there wasn’t one definitive origin point. A lot of the children were last seen at the places you’d expect: parks, bus stops, libraries. Some children went out to walk their dogs and never came back. Some were taken as they headed to a friend’s house. Some just vanished in the night.

As Karen saw it, all of Hell’s Kitchen, and a large area around the neighborhood, was currently in play. Which meant, if she was going by the tip, that she also had to look at about fifty different bars and pubs of various sizes and renown.

That wasn’t completely accurate; she figured that old establishments probably weren’t responsible for the new rash of missing children. She knocked off about twelve from the list that had been established upwards of thirty years ago. It didn’t really help narrow anything down.

Karen glanced over at her notebook, full of scrawled notes about each of the missing children (forty-seven of them) and tried for the umpteenth time to find a pattern. They were taken regardless of age, sex, or race. Different economic backgrounds, schooling, and family situations littered the page, color-coded with the intent of showing any sort of preference on the kidnapper’s part and revealing none.

Karen was getting impatient.

Getting up to grab a pencil from the cup on her desk, she saw she’d gotten another text from Foggy. After she’d complained about the lack of headway to him over the phone the night before, he’d been messaging her back with different lenses to look at the data every few hours. He had now worked his way down to “sexuality,” which was hardly something she could determine from the files and probably wasn’t something the kidnappers could have known either. She didn’t bother to reply.

Pencil in hand, she sat back down and eyeballed a rough circle around the middle of the data, then picked out all the bars within it. Seven, six of which were in play (one of them was the recently-closed Barley Mow that she’d written about in this week’s paper). Maybe if she could link one of these businesses to . . . to what? She had run through everything. Yes, the pins were more concentrated within the circle she’d drawn, but not in such a way that really counted as a trend. Not yet, anyways.

She pulled the heavy box of files over. Now that she had gone through them the first time around, she knew what she had to look for now: routes. Routes the children would take to get from where they were last seen to their homes. Mapping out each possible route had been one of her last-resort options to consolidate the data, but now it was quickly becoming one of the only options to find a pattern.

She had just flipped open the top file when someone knocked on her door. “Yeah?”

Therese popped her head in. “There’s a cop here for you.”

“Sergeant Mahoney?”

“I dunno, a cop. He says to bring the box.”

Karen’s eyes went to the object in question, feeling her heart falter. “But it’s too soon, I haven’t - “

“Look, I’m just the messenger.” She closed the door.

The breath rushed out of her; the file trembled in her hands. Aloud, she repeated, “It’s too soon.”

She got to her feet and smoothed down her skirt, leaving the box firmly planted on the ground, then left her office. Brett paced by reception, evidently impatient. She straightened her shoulders and marched over to him, forgoing pleasantries to cut straight to the point. “I’ve had them for five days, Brett, it’s not enough time.”

“Someone went to look for the case files and noticed the duplicates had gone. I need them back or I could lose my job if anyone finds out I did this.” Brett clearly wasn’t fucking around either.

Karen had to swallow an argument, then said in a perfectly level tone, “I haven’t even gotten to make copies.”

“Good!” he retorted. He let out a thin breath and ducked his head. “I’ve already bent the law enough. I need you to get them.”

She felt her sudden panic turn her stomach into a knot, but she knew she couldn’t say no. In a low voice, she said, “I’ll be right back.”

Numbly, she headed back to her office. She was about to lose everything worthwhile on this story and she couldn’t do anything about it. What was she going to tell Ellison? That she was letting another perfectly good article slip through her fingers because she hadn’t thought to break the law a little sooner and make copies? No, she couldn’t tell him. He’d cut her enough slack over the last two months, too much. She would just have to find the rest of the story herself.

She retrieved the box and deposited it into Brett’s waiting hands, then returned once more to her office to stare at the map. A quick glance at her phone told her it was nearing five. At least she had the weekend to figure something out.

Slowly, she knelt and began pulling the pins out and placing them in the plastic container they’d come from. After that, she meticulously folded the map, then stuck both articles into her purse and headed for the door. She wouldn’t gain anything from staying for the next fifteen minutes anyway; saying a hurried goodbye to the receptionist, she left the office and started home.

On the way she debated what her next move should be. In her notebook, she’d marked down the bare stats on each case: age, race, name, address, stuff like that. She could go door-to-door and question the parents, but that would probably end with at least a few uncertain calls to the police, which could spell out trouble for Brett. Another option was just running the missing child cases through other lenses: taken from parks, taken from schools, taken from wherever. Maybe they were only targeting certain areas. But it sounded like a lot of work for the night, and she wanted to do something proactive before she went to bed.

The only thing she could think of that didn’t require going over notes for the next three hours that felt like she was doing something was picking one of the six bars in her circle and scoping it out. And yes, maybe it was also an excuse to drink away her problems.

She made it home before she could talk herself out of the idea, so after making herself dinner and, yes, touching up her makeup and throwing on something slightly more approachable than her business skirt and ironed blouse, she pulled out the map, found the closest bar, and set off.

The night was already fully clamped down on the city, the smell of gasoline fumes flat against the back of her throat as she navigated the icy streets in the direction of the bar. She hadn’t been to most of the bars in the area yet, since whenever she’d gone out it had been with Foggy to Josie’s. The bar she had chosen for tonight’s “stakeout,” a pub called Churchill’s, was no different. Given the neighborhood, she wasn’t expecting much, but by the time she’d made it there, she didn’t care if it was literally piled high with sewage as long as it had four walls and some form of heating.

She pushed open the door and nearly ran into a large man carrying four beers and trying to balance a fifth between his hands. Ignoring the curse that came flying from his mouth, she ducked around him and felt the warmth start to work on her. As she stood near the front and acclimatized, she scanned the bar, trying to measure it against her previous experience with Josie’s and finding it to be about the same in terms of cleanliness, and only slightly better in terms of the percentage of those who were pass-out drunk. It was barely eight o’clock; she imagined that could quickly change.

She moved up to the bar, which was mostly occupied already, and ordered a beer from a man who looked to be at least a hundred years old. While she waited, her eyes roved over the back wall, full of ancient-looking glass bottles long since emptied of their contents and incongruous neon signs and licence plates from across the continental U.S. Half was covered in a spotty mirror, which was mostly hidden by shelves full of liquor, but she could still see her reflection in the glass. She looked pale, tired, worn. Tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, she looked away.

The rest of the bar was busy. Decently crowded, loud enough that the generic rock playing was only a backdrop to the sound of voices, with full booths and tables all around.

Her gaze caught on something. At first she couldn’t say what, but on her second inspection it wasn’t really something so much as a lack of something. An empty booth towards the back, its stained red seats vibrant against the masses dressed in black leather and grimy jeans. Or, almost empty. The booth was taken by one man. Which automatically struck Karen as odd, because no one took a booth just for themselves, unless they were an asshole.

She was about to turn back to the bar and let it go. Then, the man glanced up as a woman stumbled and nearly into the booth beside him, and she froze.

No.

_No._

She blinked, shook her head, even raised her hand to rub at her eyes before she remembered she was wearing mascara (and liner for the evening) and stopped herself before she could. This had happened before; she’d thought she’d seen him before, and she’d never been right. She’d look away, turn back, and he’d be just some guy with a certain kind of haircut whose stood a certain kind of way.

But her eyes found their way back to the broken nose, the slanted forehead, the heavy jaw, and they saw the one man Karen had sworn she’d never look for again.

She felt like she was slipping, one foot caught on solid ground and the other free, the feeling of falling but never hitting the ground. Somewhere, far in the distance, the bartender slid a beer to her and it hit her elbow. Her breath was a shout in her ears, like she was gasping for air, but at the same time she was acutely aware that she didn’t move a muscle. If she moved, the world would start again. She couldn’t let that happen.

A tipsy student slammed into her knee and she gripped the bar to keep from falling as the boy slammed into the ground, taking another man with him as his glass shattered on the floor. The sound of the scuffle, and the ensuing high pitch keen as the boy saw the shallow but bloody slash on his palm cut through the conversations, and the bar turned its attention to the scene. The kid was probably concussed, judging from the way his head had hit the ground, and the keening only got louder. While everyone’s eyes were on the boy, Karen’s were on him, watching as if in slow motion as he turned his head to look.

She couldn’t do it; she felt her dinner rise in her throat and she bolted for the bathroom on the other side of the bar, then proceeded to empty her stomach’s contents in one of the stalls. After a few minutes, she sat back, panting, angry.

He didn’t have the right to make her feel this way. She wasn’t fucking scared of him. She was _angry_ at him, for giving up, for leaving, for ruining her goddamn life. So why wasn’t she doing something about it? Why was she still letting his presence affect her? Why was she the one who was hiding in the bathroom? She should be out making there making _his_ life a fucking mess for once. He sure as hell didn’t have a “Karen Page” file to burn, but maybe when she was done with him he’d have a few bruises that spelled out her name just as well.

She dragged a shaky hand over her mouth and went to the sink, rinsing out the taste of bile and fixing her hair. She was so tired of running from him. Her mind had run in circles to escape the mere thought of him before, but no more.

She pushed back out into the room. The crowd around the fallen student had abated as someone had helped him over to a seat and bandaged his hand. Frank hadn’t moved.

Karen stalked over to the bar to grab her beer, which was sitting unopened where she’d left it, then popped it open on the barstool she’d vacated and threw some back. A moment later, she was beside him, the space contracting in a blur. She set down her beer and slid into the booth across from him.

There was a phrase on his mouth, maybe a “beat it” or a “seat’s taken.” It never made it out.

“What the _fuck_ are you doing here?”

His lips wavered as he blinked. Infinitesimally, he shook his head, hovering on the edge of denial. Karen didn’t care; she didn’t care what he could or couldn’t handle. He’d obviously been busy: bruises painted the left side of his face a deep purple, swelling over his cheekbone, and there was a split in his bottom lip. A freshly healed scar ran under the right side of his jaw, ending at his ear and partially covered by the beginnings of a beard. He looked like he’d been through hell.

Well, Karen was about to put him through some more.

When he didn’t answer, she leaned forward and hissed, “Do I need to ask again, Frank?”

Again, his mouth moved, but nothing above a whisper came out. Finally, after a full ten seconds, he hoarsely managed, “Ma’am.”

The word had made her feel safe before. Right now, it just annoyed her. “Answer me.”

“What am I doing here?” He echoed the question back to her. Either he was still in shock, which was possible, or someone had seriously damaged his vocal cords, which was also possible from the bruising Karen was just now seeing around his neck like a green and black collar. Whatever the cause, his voice was grittier than she remembered, like his tongue was made of sandpaper.

Her jaw was tight with rage. “Yes.”

His eyes narrowed. The shock had definitely worn off. “I’m doing my job, that’s what I’m doing.”

“Your _job_?”

“Yeah, my goddamn job,” he rasped. “What else?”

God, Karen wanted to hit him! Preferably on his left cheekbone. “How about following me? Am I supposed to just guess that you’re the one who sent that tip?”

The momentary look of confusion deep in his eyes told her she was heading in the wrong direction before his question did. “What tip?”

“The tip for the case I’m working on,” she said, a millisecond before mentally smacking herself. She wasn’t supposed to be answer him, he was supposed to be answering _her._

“You working a case?” A breath escaped his mouth that sounded suspiciously like derisive laughter. He wasn’t even fucking fazed. “Thought you were a journalist.”

Karen stared at him. “I never told you that.”

“You didn’t need to.” His eyes traveled across her face, the emotion in them something intangible, unreadable. He tilted his head. “I can pick up a newspaper. I liked your, ah, your mango one.”

“Shut up.” The problem was he didn’t even look like he was joking. No smile pulled at his mouth, no humor found its way into his gaze. But he did as she said; he sat back and watched her as she dug around for the words to continue. “You can’t be here.”

“Why’s that?” It was like watching a statue speak. At least before, she’d remembered a smile, a twist of his lips to indicate something, an emotion, anything. Now all he did was narrow his eyes and scrutinize her.

“Because,” Karen began, then faltered as she realized she didn’t have a real reason besides _because I say so_. It didn’t matter; his eyes were drawn to something out the window, over her shoulder. A second later, he was on his feet and heading for the door.

Karen glanced out the window, but she couldn’t see anything in the dark. Still, she surged after him, the thought finally occurring to her that maybe he was hunting the same thing as her. And if that was true, she wasn’t about to let Frank kill a possible lead.

She stormed out the front door and looked out through the heavy dark to see him marching towards a cluster of about four men standing by the far corner of the building. They didn’t notice him coming. Steeling herself, Karen shouted, “Frank!”

The call made him pause, and turned the heads of the men, who rightly looked uneasy at the sight of Frank. He started walking again, and the men scattered.

One, a skinny white guy whose tattoos obscured his face, took off down the street; Frank broke into a run, and Karen, stifling a curse, sprinted after them, wishing she’d brought some reasonable shoes or her gun, maybe to shoot Frank somewhere to slow him down before he killed someone who might actually be useful to her. Then again, knowing Frank, she would have to empty the entire clip into him before he would take a knee.

The sound of sirens rang in the distance. The ambulance for the concussed student, maybe. Karen ignored it and sped up, but Frank was faster, and the man they were chasing was faster still. Then, suddenly, the sirens were a lot closer. The man they were chasing shot out into the intersection ahead and directly into the ambulance’s path. Frank ducked into the shadow of a dumpster as the ambulance screeched the halt, but Karen saw as she followed Frank’s lead that there was no saving the man. Blood seeped into dirty snow.

Karen pressed herself into a shallow doorway and tried to catch her breath. She couldn’t stick around; if the paramedics found her they’d be suspicious to say the least. Gathering her wits, she stepped out from the doorway and looked around. Frank was gone. The paramedics were inspecting the body. Before she could think twice, she took off down the street and didn’t stop until she reached home.

Her lungs burned. Her feet were frozen. She had just seen a man killed by an ambulance in what felt like a feat of irony but probably wasn’t one. And yet the one thing on her mind, the one thing filling her thoughts, was that he was back.

The Punisher was back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so? what did you think? (frank's baaack!)  
> also, to everyone who has commented and sat there wondering why it took me so long to reply, i read all the comments basically the moment i get them because i love each and every one, but if i'm always worried if i spend too much time replying to them or reading them over to reply to them, it'll influence my writing or my plot too much (that sounds super dramatic and fakey but it's true i s2g).  
> but anyway, comments/kudos (both? both. both is good) if you liked it!


	5. five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> karen does some side research, and someone breaks into her apartment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> again, this chapter was beta'd by the wonderful tacohead13!

“Thanks, Rosie.”

Karen flipped her notebook closed and shoved her pen in her pocket as the narrow woman nodded, her frizzy silvered hair following a moment behind. Her informant’s birdlike wrists were tucked under her elbows, trying to keep her bare hands warm as the cold evening settled down to roost around them. The fraying purple cardigan pulled over her shoulders didn’t have any pockets without holes in them, so when Karen handed her the twenty dollars she’d promised her, she crumpled it and kept it in her palm instead.

“Keep yourself out of trouble, Karen,” Rosie said, her voice thin and barely audible over the rising wind. “The guy’s no good. The story’s not worth the danger.”

“I can take care of myself,” Karen replied. Her tone was meant to be comforting, but it came out with an edge. Rosie’s warnings came at the end of every meeting with her, and usually involved a “danger” of some sort that could come from following the lead. As of yet, Karen hadn’t found herself in any.

But now . . . now Rosie was justified in it. Because now that Karen knew what kind of questions to ask, answers came easier. There was still a new gang on the streets, that was sure, but she had put her quest for a print story on hold for an older one, one whose warning label Karen had already heard from every other person she’d spoken to before coming here.

Yes. Karen was chasing Frank.

The very thought in itself was crazy. She had just started to move on, just started to get back to her real life—the one where she was passionate about what she did, passionate about the truth, and not the one where she buried her head in the sand waiting for someone to pull her out of it—and here she was dragging herself back in.

It was more than that. It was a pull, a pull that came from without, a force she couldn’t shake. A rope attached to her chest, and every time she fell behind in her pursuit, it tugged tighter and tighter, forcing air from her lungs and panic into her bones, until she started moving again. Moving towards that endlessly shifting horizon, the sprawling target, understood but not clear: the blurry silhouette of a ghost from the past.

Rosie scuffed her feet, drawing Karen back with a blink. “See you around.”

“Yeah, I’ll see you,” Karen said, but her informant was already ducking back towards her apartment, the dim watery light filtering out through her aqua curtains lighting her way. Karen glanced at her phone to see the time was nearing six. She’d been out for nearly four hours, and her toes were numb in her winter boots. Though she had a few more names she could still check out, it was the end to an emotionally draining weekend and she just wanted to go home to a cup of warm tea and a microwave dinner that she could eat in front of a medical drama (she had started House M.D. as a part of her self-directed “get back to normal” program).

She started back up the street, peering through the dark at the street signs at the intersection ahead to get her bearings. Her notebook was filled with new sightings of people matching Frank’s description, as well as a few stories of hits that took out ten, fifteen people at a time without leaving a trace of their attacker. It was going on eight months since Frank had first started on his crusade, so many had forgotten what it looked like. But Karen had spent hours poring over case files, witness reports, police observations. She knew what a Frank Castle crime scene looked like, and from what she was hearing, these fit the bill.

She heard Ellison’s voice at the back of her head.  _ Why was she doing this _ ? She wasn’t going to write about him, she knew that. Even if she could somehow bring herself to spread her soul like that, no one cared anymore. Though the police search was ongoing, the public was beginning to see him as a necessary evil, if they thought of him at all.

Turning the corner, she wondered if Ellison would accept her only explanation: she was doing it for herself. Because she was suddenly vindicated, in the worst possible way. Frank Castle was definitely around, and he was even more isolated than before. For a moment, Karen wondered if the universe had planned his name as some sort of trick of fate: the man had built himself into a castle, ringed with impervious stone walls that rose into the heavens to block even the slightest bit of light from trickling down their vined sides.

Karen didn’t think that explanation would go over so well with her editor, not even with the notebook in her hand with all her new research. The words were angrily scrawled over a few pages, the image of Frank scorching her heart as her constant, low-burning anger kept the fire fed under her breast.

Ultimately, that was all the research had been for. To confirm the fact that he’d been lurking around Hell’s Kitchen and keeping far away from her.  _ Which was supposed to be a good thing _ , she reminded herself, but seeing Frank again had sent her compass spinning and she wasn’t sure what was good for her anymore. The litany of all the reasons she was better off without him had run itself dry over the weekend, replaced by the far less specific, far more violent,  _ I’m gonna kick that bastard’s ass, I’m gonna kick . . . _

She reached her apartment and stood in the lobby to warm up as she pulled out her keys. To do so, she needed to take out her phone, and she paused, staring at it. A thought was percolating at the back of her mind, but she couldn’t put it into words. Then, as though she was barely in control of her own actions, she unlocked it and went to her missed calls.

Mostly Foggy, as always. A Chinese delivery place when she’d missed their buzz. Ellison. And that one nameless number with nothing but silence on the other end.

She started up the stairs, eyes going over the number again and again, wondering if she should dare, if it would make her feel better or only add gasoline to the fire. But she had been out all day scrounging up information about him, and there was little at this point that could make her feel more angry with him. If she was being plain, she’d worked herself into a little fit of fury on her walk back and its effects were showing.

Her feet planted themselves on the mat outside her door. Taking a breath, she pressed the number, and held the phone to her ear. Heard it ring.

And heard it again. Only it was different, tinny. Fainter. She pulled her phone away, but the ringing persisted—emanating from door in front of her.

This time, she was quick with her keys. She shouldered the door open, phone in hand, and . . . there he was.

The phone was in his hand, but his eyes were instantly on her, dark under heavy brows. He stood by her desk, the lamp on it illuminating the map she had pressed full of push-pins yesterday morning. The light cast an odd look over him, turning his green bruises orange and his purple black, making of him a vaguely human-shaped creature of mottled color and shadow. His face was expressionless, his chest motionless, the slight twitch of his fingers the only part of him to betray that he lived at all.

For the briefest of moments, Karen heard silence. Even the phone glowing in his palm was muted, the hum of the radiator nonexistent. The sight of him standing there, it was beyond unbelievable. It was  _ real _ but it couldn’t be. It was even harder to take in than the sight of him at the diner, but for reasons that were entirely different. Because him being there meant all her suspicions, all the things she had convinced herself couldn’t have been true,  _ had been true _ . The broken elastic swam before her eyes, the packed snow, the slightest flutter of a curtain in the breeze. She had told herself to choose her truth, as though she was allowed to do that, to deny the one constant source of strife in her life its place. It also meant that she had wasted time and energy on rubbing away fact, ignoring the signs just like every other person in the goddamn city, like she could somehow shape the world into some comely form that certainly didn’t exist.

Before she could stop herself, she strode to him, hand reaching forward. She caught herself at the last second, fingers hovering inches from his shoulder. Both their heads turned in unison to stare at the pale outstretched fingers, neither of them able to move, as though the very motion had cast a spell over them. A charm that both pushed and pulled, trapping them in their places. Then Karen blinked, and the spell fell apart. She jerked her hand back to her side, pulled in a breath and fell back a step. Clenching her jaw, she steadied herself and her thoughts. Quietly controlled, she asked, “What the hell is this?”

His eyes narrowed slightly, but all he did was put his phone back in his pocket. His eyes roved across her face, as if to read her—but she knew she hadn’t hidden what she was thinking. Surely her thoughts ran rampant over her features, surely she didn’t even need to speak for him to know what words were accumulating on her tongue. As if sensing this, his eyes skimmed her mouth, and it was almost a physical touch, but without invitation, without substance.

Her heart jumped, anger returning in a flash, and the strange semi-solid moment shattered. Her voice came out stronger than she’d expected. “You can’t just do this shit. You know that, right? You  _ left _ , Frank.”

“I didn’t exactly have a choice,” he replied, in a voice low and guttural, scraping along the floorboards.

“Oh,  _ bullshit _ ,” Karen exclaimed. “Where do you get off on disappearing for months then breaking into my place just to dig through my shit? How is that fair? How do you rationalize this to yourself?”

His eyes had shifted to the doorway behind her, but at that, they slid back to her. Something about his presence was stiffening the air, and Karen was choking on it, breath coming in heavier. “Are you serious?”

Karen gaped at him and didn’t dignify the question with a response. Her fingers splayed and curled at her sides.

He took a single step towards her, compressing the distance between them and causing Karen to stop breathing entirely for a moment. He smelled of gun grease and hot cotton. Frank’s gaze was insistent on her until she met his eyes. It felt odd looking at him and seeing a beard—he had always been clean-shaven before. Karen could only imagine he’d grown it out a little to be less recognizable, and maybe, for most people, it worked. She knew him too well for that. He tilted his head ever so slightly towards her closed window. “Why was there an x-ray of my head buried in the snow out there?”

Karen’s throat tightened. She had been impatient, she hadn’t checked to see if it had all burned, she hadn’t thought it would matter. “I got rid of that.”

“Yeah, not that long ago, though, huh?” His mouth twisted, tone scornful. Again, Karen didn’t have the words to answer. He bobbed his head and glanced away. “‘t’s what I thought.”

“Oh, give me a break,” Karen snapped, hating that he somehow felt he had the moral ground to stand on. “Keeping a file isn’t even on the same level as breaking into an apartment. I don’t know if it’s worse that I caught you this time around, or that I almost did it the first time and you didn’t learn from your mistakes. Jesus, Frank, didn’t you get what you needed last time?”

He gave her a look she couldn’t decipher. There was a beat before he let out a short breath, possibly another one of his humorless laughs, and gestured at the notebook still in her hands. “What’s in there?”

Karen gritted her teeth, contemplating what would happen if she just knocked him one. She’d probably hurt her hand. He’d probably shake it off. “Notes.”

“About this?” he asked, indicating the map with a jerk of his head. His tone was dubious. Then, without warning, his hand shot out and snatched the book from her hand. He only had it for a second before she grabbed it back, but it was enough to catch a glimpse of the words on the page. He met her eyes, and asked a question that wasn’t really a question. “About me?”

It was only a moment, but Karen felt like a child that had been caught sneaking out of bed at night to watch television; the feeling of doing something forbidden, and being disappointed to have been caught for it. Her grip on the notebook grew tighter. “It’s not the same thing.”

“You keep telling yourself that.” His eyes traced over the room, again and again, based in instinct and years of training.

“At least my war hasn’t taken any lives yet,” Karen shot back, drawing back for an instant the image of the man streaking off down the road, Frank in pursuit.

“Then it’s not a war,” he replied. “And if you’re talking about that scumbag in the street, he deserved it.”

Karen’s cheeks were warm with anger. “Oh really? He deserved to get hit with a fucking ambulance? You didn’t even talk to him!”

“People only run if they know what’s coming for them. Reckoning.” Frank shifted his jaw. “Max Fonis. Killed a corner store clerk once in an armed robbery.”

“And that’s why you were chasing him,” Karen mocked, knowing it wasn’t the reason.

His eyes were sharp when they returned to hers. “Like I said, I was doing my job. Not yours.”

“What’s ‘my job,’ Frank?”

“Asking too many questions.”

Karen’s teeth hurt from the way she was clenching them. Her hands shook. “If you think that, then what are you looking for?”

Frank eyed her, unmoving. “Nothing.”

“Are you kidding me?”

He didn’t blink. “I don’t gotta explain myself to you.”

“Sure, okay, great,” Karen scoffed. Her chest felt tight and hot, and she couldn’t restrain herself from grabbing his jacket and jerking him towards the door. “Just get out, and stay away from me.”

For a tense moment, it looked as though he was going to resist. Karen threw her notebook down on her desk. Then he turned on his heel and left, heading for the stairs.

Karen watched him, her chest rising and falling rapidly as she felt the unspent aggression pulse through her veins. She wasn’t done with him; she didn’t feel done. A small voice at the back of her head told her not to do anything reckless, but there was blood rushing in her ears, and it deafened her to its words.

She stalked out after him, to the stairwell. He was a flight of steps below her, but he heard her coming and paused mid-step. He didn’t look up.

“Why did you even come here? Why me?”

Minutely, Frank shook his head.

“So you’re not even going to answer me?” His silence was enough. “Do you know what you do to my life, Frank? You make a mess of shit, and then you leave. That’s what. And I don’t know what you’ve been doing for the last two months since you disappeared, but  _ I’ve _ been moving on. I’m through being kidnapped or held at gunpoint or - or used as bait. I’m done. So I don’t want to see you again. Not here, not out at some bar, not anywhere. Because whatever brought you back here, it’s over. You hear me?”

He cocked his head, as if to challenge her to say more. Karen saw, even from her height, a muscle jump in his cheek. But he didn’t open his mouth.

“Nothing? Jesus  _ Christ _ .” Her hands went white-knuckled on the banister as she leaned over to glare at him. Her blonde hair slipped from behind her ears and partially obscured her view. “I can’t believe you. I can’t  _ fucking _ believe you.”

He shifted. The sound of leather moving on leather, an inhaled breath. Karen waited, but nothing came. She felt the overwhelming urge to scream, or throw something at his head, or slam her door.

Then, it all left her: the anger, the energy, the strength. All of a sudden she felt a heaviness beneath her breast, like her heart had been struck and turned to stone. She was  _ tired _ of the rage, the spitting fury that had been lurking in the back of her mind for much longer than she had felt it. It had been sitting in wait for two long, lonely months, picking up steam with every passing slight. And now it had run itself out, like a flash flood. She felt spent.

She ran a hand over her face and pulled away from the stairs. She was sure her quieted voice still carried as she said, “I just can’t do this anymore.”

Karen headed back to her apartment. It was still within earshot of the stairs; just as she closed her door, she heard him speak one last time.

“Good thing I’m dead to you.”

Her hand slid the bolt home.

She didn’t even make it a second before her knees gave out beneath her and she collapsed against the door. Fingers shook, locking with each other, gripping hard until it hurt. Her eyes itched with budding tears, and after a brief attempt to blink them away, she let them fall. They traced hot streaks down her cheeks, quietly at first. Then she sucked in a deep breath, and when it came out, it was a crumpled sob, spilling into her lap and echoing around the apartment.

After that, it was all she could do to muffle the sound with her hands, the gasping, faltering cries stifled behind trembling palms. Her whole body shuddered, her hair rucking up behind her head against the door. She felt like she had been scrubbed raw; her throat burned, her eyes burned, her lungs burned. Now, as the tired ache settled deep in her bones, she felt the dull throb of guilt at the back of her skull. Frank’s final words were the bullet in her brain, plowing through any other thought and leaving a gaping hole behind.

He was only sending her words back to her. He was only reminding her of the blow she’d dealt to him. He was only doing what she had been doing in her mind to him for days, weeks, months. He’d left her. She’d left him.

And now they’d done it again.

Karen wasn’t sure how long it took to cry herself out, but she did know the moon visible through the slit in her curtains when she finally crawled into bed, shaking and cold. She was asleep the moment she fell to the comforter, and nightmares sprung from the ground immediately to torment her. A bare forest at night, a gunshot ringing through the air. Only as the gunshot ricocheted through the trees, it sounded like words, that pecked like daws at her ears and left her bloody.

_ Dead to me. Dead to me. Dead to me. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here's frank! again!  
> now that you guys got to see a little more of him, i'd love to hear your opinions on how i wrote him (his voice, his descriptions, etc.), or your opinions on this chapter in general! (yes, that's my suuuper subtle way of asking for comments again.)  
> i hope you liked it!


	6. six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> karen lies to her boss, and a friend gives her a lead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter was beta'd by the always-patient tacohead13!

Karen didn’t go into the office on Monday. Nor did she go in on Tuesday, and she almost made it to the door before she decided she couldn’t make it on Wednesday either.

To make up for the loss, she typed up an extra little piece along with her community insight column, one of the weekly rotation “free write” columns that could be about any issue that could be covered in a sixth of a page or less. She wrote about gun control, or vigilantes, or elections, or some other topic that was necessary to discuss but somehow overworked. Something easy.

Ellison had taken her at her word that she was sick, and in truth, she was. Her doctor, when she went to see him Monday afternoon, said it was probably a cold. They were common around that time of year, and the symptoms fit: runny nose, cold hands, cough, headache, fatigue.

But even with the doctor’s signature and Ellison’s acceptance, Karen felt like she had just created a massive lie. Because surely this was all because of Frank. Surely all her worrying and her aching had manifested itself in some more physical way. Catching a cold somehow felt like too much of a coincidence, despite having been out half the weekend in the snow and cold looking for leads about him. She lay at home and read over the missing children notes over and over.

It was Thursday morning when she woke to an email from Ellison asking after her. The words were innocent enough, the tone caring, but Karen couldn't stand it. It felt like weakness, like he'd found her out. She ran a brush over her teeth, fixed her hair, and headed for the door with her notebook in hand. She left the map on the table - whenever she closed her eyes, it flashed in the back of her mind, a reminder to get back to work.

Her head throbbed as she walked into the office, a dull pounding at the base of her skull. Coffee would help; she'd become adept at making it in the weeks after Frank's disappearance. She'd used to leave cups of it sitting around her apartment for no reason, leaving the air as bittersweet as the memories they recalled. Karen had even learned how to turn shitty office coffee into something tolerable (it was all in the grind).

Ellison saw her as she was walking to the kitchen to make some. He quickly assured the political cartoonist he'd be back in a second and marched up to her as she fiddled with the brewer.

“You look like shit, Page. What are you doing here?” Even with his voice pitched low, his concern rang clear.

“Glad I can count on you for honesty, boss.”

“Don't try to dodge the question.” She looked up to meet his eyes, stern behind rectangular frames.

“I've got work to do,” she said. She heard the words left unspoken in _his_ voice: _it's my job_.

Out if the corner of her eye, Ellison rubbed his hands together, a dry papery sound. Abstractly, Karen considered whether he'd spent so much time writing for the newspaper that he was starting to become it. She shrugged away the thought as he cleared his throat. “How about you go home, and I print your fruit story from last week.”

Karen started the coffee, practically slamming the pot into place. Lowly, she replied, “No you won't. It's bullshit journalism, you said so yourself.”

“Okay, so maybe I won't. Doesn't change the fact that you shouldn't be here when you're still recovering from a cold.”

Karen's grip on the counter was painfully tight. The smell of burnt popcorn from the microwave was acrid on her tongue, swirling with the coffee and making her head spin. Her eyes clamped shut. “I'm not leaving.”

After a long pause, she drew in a steadying breath and opened her eyes again. Her voice was calmer when she continued. “I'm driving myself crazy there. At least here I can get away from it.”

“Get away from what?”

Frank's face rose unbidden in her mind's eye, like a ghost. Her throat clenched. He seemed to fill every empty space back home; every shadow, every subtle sound, every flicker of the lights felt like him. In a wintery forest night, his breath was at her ear and his warmth at her back. He haunted her. He hunted her. He had her.

The muscles in her jaw worked. Ellison's gaze was a worried weight on her shoulders.

Blinking slowly, she intoned, “My neighbor's dog. It - It barks a lot. I can't block it out.”

Even though she didn’t feel like it was a very convincing statement, Ellison released a sigh that seemed to be sympathetic in nature. He leaned back against the counter and fiddled with his glasses for a moment. “You know we care about you here, right?”

A watery smile made its way to the surface of Karen’s face. “I know.”

“Good.” He cleared his throat, as if to clear away the emotion in his voice. He pushed his glasses back up his nose and levered himself away from the counter. Gruffly, he added, “Good talk.”

“Yeah, good talk,” Karen replied, and watched as he ducked out of the kitchen without looking back. The coffee maker beeped before she could soak in the silence his exit left behind, and she unhurriedly poured herself a cup, breathing it in.

Now that she was at work, she needed a game plan. Her community piece was finished but she’d left it at home on one of her many USBs, so she couldn’t hand it in yet. That left the tip still crumpled in her pen cup back at her desk, the notes in her book, and the pin-covered map.

Her trip to her randomly-selected bar had been inconclusive. She could, quite honestly, just type up what she knew and make the link to a possible new group and have a decent article as it was, but it didn’t feel like she was doing enough. Brett hadn’t told her about any new developments in the cases, though, which meant it was still her meager resources up against los Cangrejos - whatever or whoever that was.

She took a pensive sip of coffee and started back to her office. Ellison had moved on from the political cartoonist by that time; he was across the room, talking to the horoscope writer. She looked down before he could sense her eyes on him, just so she wouldn’t have to smile or nod or make some other act of false reassurance.

Once she got to her office, she closed the door solidly behind her. She’d dropped her things off at her chair before she’d gone to make coffee; her notebook was tossed haphazardly on her desk, and Karen went to flip it open. She felt like she was so close to something with the article, close to the truth. Maybe she’d been staring at it for too long, but she felt like she was finally starting to see something.

After a brief hesitation, she pulled up the area on Google Maps. The image in her mind wasn’t good enough for street names, but she had gone over the notes what must have been over a hundred times in the last week and a half, and she just kept coming back to the routes the children must have taken. She’d sketched them out back at her apartment, but it had been mostly speculation.

She glared at the screen for a minute, as if she could force the map to reveal its secrets with the sheer force of her gaze. _There was something, something about the paths_ -

A shrill ringing pierced the air, nearly startling Karen from her chair. Her phone nearly skittered off her desk as it vibrated, the screen flashing Foggy’s name.

Karen brought it to her ear. “What’s up?”

“I think I have something for your case.”

She started. “What? What do you mean?”

Foggy huffed impatiently on the other end, and Karen heard the squeak of his desk chair. “I _mean_ people have been calling me to ask for help. People from Nelson and Murdock. They’re saying they’re being extorted by some gang.”

Karen sat forward. “Extorted how? Under what threats?”

“A few different ones, from what they’re telling me. None of them good, obviously. According to a bunch of them, they have a policy of ‘what’s taken stays taken,’ too.” He sounded in a rush to get out the information, occasionally tripping over his words. There was the rustle of paper as he sorted out notes on his desk. “Mrs. Lomsky didn’t pay and her granddaughter disappeared three days later, and they never came back to collect any sort of payment for her. And the Palladios - you remember them? - they couldn’t pay on time and their son was taken a week later.”

“Shit,” Karen breathed, the names setting off bells in her head. Their names floated up before her eyes in her own hand, remnants from having stared at them for three days straight. She set the phone down on her desk and put it on speaker before turning to her computer and typing up what he’d said. “How many - ”

“How many calls have I gotten? At least six. And they’ve told me about other people in the neighborhood, which would be hearsay in a court of law but I figured you could still use that. I’ve got all the notes I took, I’m sending them to you now.”

Karen paused in her typing and picked the phone back up. “Why didn’t you call me before?”

There was the low hiss of an exhaled breath. “The calls started about two weeks ago, but I only started thinking about the connection once you told me about your missing children. And before this weekend, I’d had just the one person calling about missing kids, then the others started talking about it too but you weren’t answering my calls - ”

A pang of guilt struck Karen in the chest and she dipped her head. “Sorry. I was sick.”

“Yeah, Ellison told me when I called the office.” There was a short silence, in which Karen cursed her isolationist bullshit and Foggy flipped through more notes. “Most of them haven’t called the police yet, so this might be all on you.”

“Did you tell them to?”

“What do you think?” He sounded tired. “You know that doesn’t necessarily mean they will, though. So in case they don’t - ”

“I’m on it, Foggy.” She opened her email to see that Foggy had already sent the notes, so she clicked on them. Three fully typed pages of notes in Foggy’s shorthand. She skimmed them quickly, then added, “Did you manage to catch a name?”

“Of the gang? I’m not sure. Mr. Cordeira kept repeating the word _crabs_ at me but that doesn’t sound like an actual thing, so I’m not sure what to - ” He cut himself off. Faintly, a woman’s voice carried across the line, muffled but clearly directed at Foggy. It went on for almost a minute before Foggy brought her back to his ear and said, “I’ll have to call you later. Maybe tomorrow? Work stuff.”

“Thanks, Foggy,” Karen said, getting a monosyllabic goodbye noise in return before he ended the call.

She let the news soak in for a second - _another lead_ , and a real one, one that confirmed the existence of los Cangrejos and their action on the streets - and sat back in her seat. Then, she scrolled back to the top of Foggy’s notes and started reading.

* * *

By quitting time, Karen had gotten a surprising amount of work done.

After running through the borrowed notes a couple of times, she’d cross-referenced them with the names in her notebook, trying to see if the stories lined up, the dates, the locations. Some of them gave extra information - for some kids, she’d just marked things like _night, Guernsey Park_ , while Foggy’s notes were more thorough; _between eight and nine p.m., Guernsey Park, four days after failed payment_. From what she was seeing, in fact, all the children who’d been taken according to what Foggy had given her had been taken at night.

Karen was hesitant to cry pattern, but it was certainly shaping up into one. Each one of the calls Foggy had gotten aligned with one of the names in her book (either on a last name basis, or after some researching marriage certificates for maiden names), and each of them was taken after six at night and before six in the morning. Once Karen got home, she would look into taking out the pins for anyone kidnapped during the day, but at the moment she was just focused on making sure she had all her ducks in a row.

She was just printing off the notes so she could have a physical copy to mark up at home when Ellison stuck his head in without knocking. She glanced up just as he brandished a piece of folded paper at her. She saw her name printed in some sort of sans-serif font on one side. “Someone dropped this off for you.”

“Did you see who?”

He shook his head. “One of our guys brought it up, said it was taped to the front door.”

Karen dropped the notes off at her desk, the paper still warm from the printer, then plucked the tip from Ellison’s fingers and opened it. “It’s an intersection. Orchard and Montgomery.”

“From the same person as before, you think?”

She immediately shook her head and showed him the tip. “It’s printed. The other was hand-written. And this is already looking a lot more helpful than the first one.”

“Should I even bother to warn you against going alone?” Ellison stepped back from the door, preparing himself for her closing the door in her face.

Karen’s mouth twisted into something like a smile. “Who would I take with me?”

“The cops, for starters.” He looked at her for a long moment, then blew out a breath and took his hands off his hips. “I thought not.”

“At least you’re catching on,” she replied, the smile becoming real for a fraction of a second. She folded the tip back up and closed the door in lieu of confronting the mildly quizzical expression on his face.

She headed back to her desk and looked up the intersection on a map. The vaguely familiar street names were confirmed when she saw they were in Hell’s Kitchen, and if she remembered her drawn circle properly, the intersection was just beyond its edges. Zooming in, she couldn’t see anything worth getting excited over - an apartment building, a bench, a couple of old trees - but she knew the only way to be certain was to do what Ellison had warned her of.

She glanced down at the typed note. It didn’t have a time, but since it had been delivered within the day, it was probably meant for after she’d finished work. A quick peek at the clock showed that it had edged past five during her conversation with her boss. If she was going to go ahead with the tip, then it was now or never.

Furtively, she grabbed her purse and pulled open a small, discreet interior pocket to make sure her .380 was still with her. The cool metal against her fingertips was a comfort. For a moment, she allowed herself to remember the last time she actually held the gun and intended to use it.

_Why did every memory trace back to him?_

Her throat clenched as the gun slid back into the purse, and she hastily folded Foggy’s notes and shoved them in next to the lip gloss and the tissues and made sure to keep the gun as separate from the rest of her things as Frank was from her thoughts. Her old superstition, the one that had borne the habit, returned for a moment: if the gun touched her things, if it mixed with them, it would taint everything. It would bring those parts of her life together, the clean professional version of herself she wore like a shield of gold and the pale-cheeked fired clay mold of a person beneath that burned to the touch. The one who would fight for truth in the light of day, and the one who would sink down those in her path in the dead of night with the weight of a lead bullet.

But then her hand slid back into her purse and held it, felt its weight on her palm, and her thoughts came to a screeching halt. They were already beginning to bleed into each other. Slowly, she dragged the gun out of its pocket and gently, gingerly, placed it next to the notes. Too late to go back now.

The office was a blur around her as she left. A few people tried to talk to her, but Ellison had been right that morning - she looked like shit - so when she didn’t answer them, they probably chalked it up to stuffy ears or a desire to get home to bed. Instead, Karen was running over the route in her mind. She hadn’t seen any meters, so at least she didn’t have to drop her car off at home and walk from there.

The ride over passed in the blink of an eye. Karen’s nerves were on high-alert as she pulled her car in front of a parked ambulance, eyes scanning the intersection for anything, anyone that looked out of place. She hauled her purse onto her lap, then, after a breath to steel herself, stepped out into the street.

The cold wind hit her hard as she looked around in the fading light. The faintest streaks of red shot over the horizon as the sun set, turning the snow an odd pale pink. Maybe it was how her eyes were drawn to that which allowed her attention to falter, just for a second.

Just enough time for a hand to clamp down on her mouth and pull her off her feet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you all for reading! i haven't replied to any of the comments on last chapter (sorry!), but i'll get to them soon! i also hope my late replies don't stop you from commenting or leaving your kudos here!


	7. seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> karen comes face-to-face with her article, and requires some saving.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i think i should just officially state in lieu of doing this every chapter that tacohead13 is my wonderful beta for this whole story (and she even made sure to do two chapters last week so that i could publish even when she was on vacation like how awesome is that??)

Karen’s heels kicked at the air.

There was a second of complete disorientation, street swinging around her and hot, damp breath on her neck, and a sudden jump in her heart rate. Fear shot straight through her, hitting her in her sternum, turning her muffled screams into little more than angry gasps as she was dragged away from her car. She struggled, digging her elbows into her attacker as much as she could with their other arm coiled around her chest like a straightjacket. Her purse was still in her hand, but she couldn’t get her hand in it to grab her gun.

They hit the curb, and for a moment, Karen dug her feet into the grit-covered snowbank and felt resistance, like she might actually be able to escape. Then four more hands grabbed her, unfamiliar faces bobbing into view, and they lifted her bodily out of the snow. Karen continued to shriek under her captor’s fingers, tasting metal and nicotine, but even as she fought, she felt herself carried down the sidewalk backwards, the light from the setting sun cut off suddenly in the shadow of the ambulance.

Before she could even question why no one in the ambulance was taking notice of her, she heard the back doors slam open and felt the change in direction of the men carrying her. Heading for the ambulance. Her eyes rolled around trying to catch a glimpse of their attire, seeing something like a uniform on the two that she could see, but they fit poorly; the sleeves were folded back for one of the men, clearly too long, and his shirt looked too loose. Tattoos crawled up the next of the other, and a single diamond-shaped spot of ink near his eye recalled something she’d heard Foggy say once, when he was telling her about something that had happened at the hospital.  _ Face tats mean prison. _

They definitely weren’t paramedics.

Her thoughts spun furiously, trying to figure out why she wasn’t more surprised. Something about the ambulance. Something about -

The men jerked her towards the vehicle and her head struck a glancing blow off the open doors. The train of thought dissolved as pain expanded across the back of her skull, causing her to squeeze her eyes shut temporarily as her ears rang.

Even with her efforts, Karen was soon hauled into the back of the ambulance, trading in the soft pink light of the growing twilight for a harsh fluorescent glow and the smell of cigarette smoke. The doors slammed behind them. Her attackers dropped her like a stone onto a gurney, and she immediately tried to bolt before they forced her down again. She thrashed about but there were more of them; faces crowded her vision as they strapped her down, the synthetic straps pulling tight against her skin when they pushed her jacket sleeves up.

The hand left her mouth, but with the doors closed, she didn’t see the purpose of screaming any more. She glared up at her captors, trying to memorize as much as she could about them, even as her head continued to throb. A lot of them looked Latino, their skin still carrying a copper hue in the winter months. She vaguely remembered hearing the news that the Mexican cartel had stopped operating in Hell’s Kitchen, but she couldn’t remember the circumstances or whether the information had been good from the start. Maybe this was another group that had risen up to take its place?

Someone cleared their throat behind her, and she forced her head back, ignoring the stab of pain, to see a man who could barely be five years older than her, with black hair styled in a gel that gleamed wetly under the lights. He stepped forward, lowering the strain on her neck. His face wasn’t unfriendly, but given where Karen was, she wasn’t planning on forgetting it.

He opened his mouth, revealing white teeth. “Miss Page. You received our message.”

“It was a little obvious for my taste,” she replied. Her voice was smoother than she had expected, low and moderated. 

The corner of his mouth quirked up, as though he thought she was funny. As though someone in this situation could be amused. Maybe from his position, he could be. “Obvious but functional, you have to agree. We didn’t even need to specify a time. You’ve been very cooperative.”

Karen’s eyes flickered over to the man who’d first grabbed her; he stood with a hunch, hand on his ribs. If Karen wasn’t mistaken, she’d felt something crack under her elbow. Her mouth shifted. “Cooperative isn’t . . . exactly the word I’d use.”

“Cooperative enough.” The smile was gone between one blink and the next, though his expression stayed professional. He nodded at one of the men standing around Karen, who moved to knock on the division between the front cabin and the back. A moment later, there was the unmistakable rev of an engine firing up. The man turned to Karen once more. “Let me be the first to thank you for your tenacity. Your reputation precedes you.”

“Are you going to kill me?” Karen demanded, almost cutting him off. There was a brief silence. Even as fear set her teeth on edge, Karen reined herself in, forcing her gaze up. She locked eyes with the man addressing her. “If you are, I’d get on with it.”

Another fake laugh. The ambulance started moving, jostling everyone else in the vehicle but him. He took a step closer to her, so he was looking straight down at her. From below, Karen saw he had a strong jawline, a nose askew from one too many breaks. His shirt was unbuttoned at the top, and she saw the edge of a tattoo on his collarbone, though she couldn’t make out what it was. “Why would you assume we want to kill you?”

She scoffed. “You’re sure as hell not going to let me walk free.”

“Don’t try to act like you understand our motives,” he told her. After listening to him speak long enough, Karen finally decided that he didn’t have an accent. New to the city, perhaps, but not to the country. “I’m certain you don’t. You’re a part of something greater, Miss Page, a fact that you have conveniently forgotten.”

Something about his words niggled at the back of her mind, but her thoughts were still fuzzy from her knock in the head. Her eyes narrowed infinitesimally. “Is this about Matt?”

The man’s expression didn’t change, but then again Karen imagined it took something a lot more than a simple question to shake him. “Why do you think you get to ask?”

He stared at her for a second, then breathed in through his nose and lowered himself a little so that they were closer in height. He gave her a carefully calculated smile. “But, in a show of good faith, I will honestly tell you that this has nothing to do with this Matt person. It has nothing to do with anything you think it has to do with. All you know right now is that we want you, and that’s all you’re going to know. In fact, I’d suggest you keep your mouth shut so you don’t embarrass yourself any more than you already have.”

He maintained eye contact with her for a second, as if waiting for her to speak again, but her mouth stayed shut. Instead, her eyes traced down his neck to the tattoo, fully visible now. A small, unadorned crab.

_ Los Cangrejos _ .

Karen’s heart stuttered, just as the sound of shattering glass broke the silence. It was immediately followed by the harsh careen of the ambulance and the sudden, jolting stop accompanied by the sound of of screeching, crumpling metal. Karen’s gurney lurched forward as everyone else in the cab stumbled or fell. Her body clenched, hands going to grab onto something and finding cool metal bars as she ducked her head, right before the gurney collided with cabin divider. Karen’s teeth snapped together, sending sparks of pain shooting through her jaw to her temples and aggravating the growing lump from her impact with the doors.

Everyone around her was shouting, pulling guns from bags, belts, socks. It was all Spanish, but Karen could only catch the odd word. Maybe it was another gang? Gang violence wasn't uncommon in the area, and Karen's luck was already shaping up to be the very bad kind. Everything had a strange crystalline glow around it - maybe she was slipping into shock. She tried to focus on something, anything, so that she didn’t slip any further.

Then, on a signal from the man who’d spoken to her, the men all fell silent. He gestured at the back door, and one of them inched forward, hand going to the lock. Karen tried to watch, but her head spun. The man with the crab tattoo loomed over her, arm hovering above her chest as though to keep her from getting up.

They readied themselves, waiting for their leader’s go. There was a weird atmosphere about them, but Karen couldn’t put her finger on what it was. Whatever it was, she knew that whoever was on the other side of those doors was in for a fight.

The man made a motion Karen didn’t catch. Suddenly, the doors were shoved open and the thugs poured out, gunshots ringing out as they turned around the side of the ambulance, out of Karen’s line of sight. Night had fallen since she’d been strapped down, and the light from the streetlamps illuminated patches of frozen pavement, cracked sidewalks. There was the wet, dull thud of a body hitting the street joined by a corresponding scream, then another, and another, as shouts continued to pass between them. The man standing over Karen glanced down at her, something working quickly behind his eyes. He looked down at his gun, then gave her a real grin, the first one she’d seen from him. It spoke of the determination to stay alive any way possible. Lowly, he said, “I expect we’ll meet again, Karen.”

And he was gone, ducking from the ambulance in the opposite direction than the others had taken and vanishing into the dark.

The gunfire continued to light up the street. Now that Karen was alone, she turned her attention to escaping so that whoever was coming after them didn’t take her out in the process. She doubted that whatever gang violence was playing out on the street would somehow avoid her, and she wasn’t planning on dying today.

Her wrists rubbed raw under the straps as she frantically pulled at them, heart pounding in her ears. They were thick, tied tight. Instead of snapping, they slid, the smooth metal bars giving them no purchase. She didn’t have a chance.

Desperately, she started to rock the gurney, slipping down so that her feet dangled off the end. Worst case scenario, she would run like a fucking gurney-table turtle instead of sticking around like a sitting duck.

There was a loud screech from the street and the world abruptly fell silent. A gun clicked, an empty magazine clattered on the ground. Karen’s breath rushed out of her and she froze.

Quick, purposeful steps approached the open doors. Karen’s turtle plan was a no-go; her head was spinning, the adrenaline making her sick and worsening the preexisting headache. All she could do was sit and listen as what she could only imagine was her death paced closer.

She squeezed her eyes shut. Why had she followed that stupid tip? Why was she always getting into shit she had no business being in? Why did violence follow her like a black cloud?   
Someone jumped into the cab, making the gurney rattle. Hands were on her face a moment later, thumb rough against her jaw. “You okay?”

Karen’s eyes flew open at his voice,  _ his _ voice. Of course it was him.

It was always him.

Frank’s face floated above hers, swimming slowly into focus. Blood freckled his cheeks, his forehead, his neck, but Karen couldn’t tell if any of it was from him. His jacket, while scuffed, didn’t have any holes as far as she could see, though the brown leather was spattered with its fair share of the stuff and was stained ruddy in patches where he’d let blood sit for too long before. His eyes inspected her, watching how her gaze latched onto him, then moving on with his hands as they felt the back of her neck, then upwards. Karen could only stare at him, barely breathing, as his fingers ran over the bump on her head. He pressed gently and she winced. Pain crackled outwards from the source.

His manner was quick, business-like. Without looking at her, he asked from rote, “What day is it?”

“Thursday.”

“What’s your name?”   
“Karen Page.”

“Who was the first president?”

“George Washington.” When he opened his mouth to ask another question, she preempted him by saying, “It’s 2016, the economy sucks, and the first line of _ Moby Dick  _ is ‘Call me Ishmael.’ I’m fine.”

Frank gave a very obvious cursory look about their surroundings, then slid his eyes back to hers. “Yeah, you’re fine.”

Karen’s teeth clicked together. “You know what I mean.”

A breath escaped his lips, one of his humorless laughs. He moved to her hands, his fingers making quick work of the straps. “I forgot how much you like to spew bullshit.”

Karen’s headache kicked it up a notch as frustration sprung up, sharp and caustic. She got up and gripped the side of the gurney as she got her feet beneath her. “The only thing that’s bullshit around here is you. You break into my apartment and won’t even tell me why, and now here you are again, and so help me you’re going to give me some goddamn answers this time. Were you following me?”

“Yeah, and I saved your life,” he said, tone suddenly harsh and mouth twisted. Karen saw it and felt a corresponding hitch in her breath - finally, some real emotion. Something  _ real _ out of him for the first time since that night in the woods. “You gonna get angry at me for that too?”

“What, am I not allowed to be?”

“ _ I saved your life _ ,” he repeated loudly, turning his head to look at her. His eyes were dark under heavy brows. “I’m pretty sure that’s supposed to count for something.”

The way he said it made it sound like it was some sort of penance. Karen took a fumbling step back, mouth dropping open in furious disbelief. “Is this you getting even? You break in, so you save me? Because I distinctly remember telling you to stay the hell away from me.”

“Stay away - ” he cut himself off. He rubbed a hand over his mouth, shaking his head. In a moment, he spoke again, tone just barely more controlled. “If I’d done that then you’d probably be dead right now, so I’m going to assume this is the shock talking.”

His voice was gritty, angered. Karen was glad. Finally, he was starting to feel like she’d felt for the last two months.

“I’m not in shock, and I had things under control,” Karen snapped.

He reeled back, took a step towards the door before spinning back and slamming his fist into the ambulance wall, a harsh sound. Karen didn’t let her surprise show. He strode over to her, making her straighten. Somewhere inside, she knew he wasn’t trying to intimidate her - he was just trying to get her to listen to him. But she  _ really _ wasn’t in the mood. Lowly, he said, “I’m not gonna tell you how fucking stupid that sounds because the cops are going to get here soon and we gotta go.”

“I’m not going to flee the scene, Frank.” She leveled him with a hard glare.

“So you’re just going to wait around and try to explain how you got here and what happened to them? What, you - you gonna use my name, or make something up?”

“I did it with the Colonel,” she hissed.

_ There _ \- That did it. He flinched, stepped back, the night in the woods flashing before his eyes. Karen had finally struck a nerve with that one. He stared at the opposite wall as he refocused, the righteous fire leaving him. In a far more monotonous voice, he said, “You’re not safe. They knew where you were going to be and waited for you.”

“They knew because they sent me a tip about the intersection.”

His gaze sharpened. “The tip you thought I sent?”

“No.”

His eyes returned to hers, annoyance coming back between one blink and the next. “Jesus. You’re gonna get yourself killed.”

The words hung in the cold air between them, striking a chord. Karen’s chest rose and fell rapidly, arms crossed defensively over her chest. Frank, on the other hand, stood at an angle to her, fingers twitching at his sides. She only just now noticed the bullet-proof vest he was wearing, spray-painted with a faded, blood-speckled skull.

She gestured to it with a motion of her head. “What the hell is that?”

His expression didn't shift. “Me.”

Karen’s heart stilled, but she forced herself to scoff. She would think that over later. Right now, her priority was getting out of the ambulance and away from Frank. She bent to snatch her purse from where it had fallen next to the gurney, throwing off her balance so that she stumbled a little as she walked past him. The question must have fazed him more than she realized, though, because he allowed it. Her feet hit icy pavement and she steadied herself with the door.

The scene that met her eyes when she stepped out into the street was less brutal than it had sounded from inside the cabin. Six bodies lay in the dark street, their blood indistinguishable under the stark light. Karen maneuvered around them numbly, unsure of her direction. Her eyes went to the front of the ambulance, which had run into a fire hydrant on the curb after Frank’s shot had taken out the driver. She couldn’t see him sitting there; he must have fallen sideways, which explained the change in direction as his hands had gone with him.

Her gaze fell to the left side of the bumper. There was a blackish smear over a shallow but wide dent, and Karen’s train of thought from earlier suddenly roared to life again. Ambulance. Where had she seen an ambulance recently?

The bar.

That’s why it had hurtled around the corner so fast, uncaring of who was in its path, runner included. Someone must have tipped them off that she’d been spotted, and they’d come running. And when that had failed, they’d sent her something that played right into her interests.

She felt faint all of a sudden; her knees gave out, but before she could hit the ground, she was propped up by a pair of strong arms. He pushed her back up and turned her around so that she could lean into him, which was all she was capable of doing for some reason. She hadn’t even heard Frank come around the side of the ambulance. Swallowing tightly, she said, “This was the one from Saturday, the one that hit the guy you were chasing.”

“Looks like.”

A fleeting thought crossed Karen’s mind, and she glanced over at broken window and dash beyond that. Next to the wheel, a GPS glowed brightly through the darkness. “I want to know where it’s been.”

“It’s the one, we already know that.”

“ _ Can you get the data _ ?”

He looked down at her, confusion coming and going in an instant. He didn’t understand - she barely did, as dizzy as she was - but he nodded once, briefly. He moved her over to lean against the side of the ambulance and hopped into the cab.

Karen’s fingers roved over the frigid metal, the cold seeping in through her coat. Her fingertips caught on a small dent from a stray bullet. There was a grunt from the cab as Frank yanked the GPS wholly out of the dash, which gave way a moment later to the distant sound of sirens.  _ The police response time is abysmal _ , Karen thought distractedly as Frank dropped out of the cab.

He was by her side again in an instant, arm going around her and shoulder inching under her armpit to keep her standing as he pulled her away from the ambulance. “I’m going to get you out of here.”

“I want to stay,” Karen said, or tried to say, but it came out stuttery and slurred. The combination of head injury, shock, and revelation were all coming together and she wasn’t going to hold out much longer. She hated that she looked weak in front of him, hated that he was seeing  _ this _ Karen, not the Karen who had fought back against los Cangrejos or put together a potential pattern that afternoon.

He directed her over to a rusty black car on the other side of the road, leading her around the side to the passenger seat and putting the GPS in her lap. It was heavy against her thighs, the sharp corners digging in. Soon he was in the driver’s seat, headlights flooding the street ahead of them. “Stay with me.”

“I’m  _ fine _ .”

This was clearly not the case. She barely managed to strap herself in before her head fell back and the pain pushed her over the edge to unconsciousness. The last thing she heard before she was completely gone was the sound of the car pulling out and Frank’s exasperated, quiet words.

“Dammit, Karen.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yes, that is the sound of me laughing at all of you who thought it was frank who swept her off her feet at the end of last chapter (i got you!!)  
> that is also the sound of me laughing because wow i cannot believe you're all still reading this and i hope you enjoy the never-smooth and always-angsty frank castle and karen page, ladies and gentlemen!!


	8. eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> karen wakes up in a strange apartment, and frank loses his temper.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm sorry for two reasons: a) this is a week late! i was out of the country and i thought it would be easier to wait until the next sunday (aka today) to post the chapter.  
> b) this is un-beta'd, so if there are any typos, it's because i'm an idiot and i'm kinda too lazy to go back to edit it just yet. hopefully there aren't that many!

When Karen woke, she didn’t recognize her surroundings.

Disorientation hit hard and fast as she stared up at an expanse of white ceiling tiles laced with water damage, bathed in the watery, fickle light of the hour just after dawn. The rest of her senses slowly returned, starting with a sour, coppery taste behind her teeth. She tongued at her cheek, feeling ragged skin; she must have bitten it in her sleep. Next she felt the cramped feeling of something pressing into her back. She shifted and realized it was a spring, almost coming out of the mattress she was lying on.

If she swung out her right hand, she could hit the white-washed cement wall, but the room continued to her left, fading out of her line of sight. Karen carefully turned her head, her head and stiff neck protesting the motion.

The first thing she saw was a long wooden table, its entire surface covered in guns or pieces of them, interspersed with assorted clips and cartridges - Karen couldn’t see much more from her angle, since the mattress was set directly on the cool cement floor. Beyond the table was a small stovetop, the white paint peeling and revealing rusted metal along its edges. The shoddy wooden cabinets, which had probably been a bright daisy yellow once, were now a dull, faded lemon hue, and the refrigerator that hummed along beside them was at least thirty years old, and probably older.

The light was partly coming from a window set just above a sink, the sheer white curtains embroidered with small white flowers along the bottom oddly juxtaposed with the grimy glass knobs and dingy basin set below it. From the sliver of the outside world that Karen could see between the curtains and the frame, they were pressed almost right up to the dark-brick building next door. The majority of the light was coming from the window beside the refrigerator, again covered by the sheer curtains. 

Looking over the rest of the room, it was much of the same. A moth-eaten couch, the maroon paisley pattern mostly worn away through years of use, was arranged at a slight angle to another beat-up table, this one covered in pieces of newspaper and a police scanner - and, hidden behind that, the GPS Frank had pulled from the ambulance.

The sound of keys rattling in the hall made Karen shut her eyes again, just as the door opened and Frank entered. His steps didn’t sound as loud as they usually did - was he quieting them for her benefit, or for his own in order to not draw too much attention to himself? The latter seemed far more likely.

There was the crinkling sound of paper bags, followed by a low thump as he set them on the counter - near the sink, if Karen had her mental map right - and more crinkling as he started unloading whatever was in them. This went on for several minutes, and Karen almost began to fade into sleep again, before there was the creak of a cabinet hinge and Frank pulled something out. Karen couldn’t recognize the next sound, a shivery metal clang succeeded by a soft curse as Frank hastily cut it off. Her eyes opened just as he turned to check on her, so she quickly shut them again and hoped he hadn’t noticed.

When he started moving again a second later, she decided she’d been successful. He continued to shuffle around the kitchen area, and slowly Karen figured out that he was making eggs. She took the time to catalog her memories of the night before, tracing them up to the point at which they cut off as Frank drove off. He’d called her Karen, if she’d heard properly - a fact currently up for debate, given how she’d knocked her head and been inches from unconsciousness at the time. That would have been the first time he’d ever said her name. Now, it was all easily resolved if it hadn’t happened. But, if she hadn’t misheard, Karen wasn’t quite sure what that meant.

The dial on the stove clicked as Frank turned it off. The cabinets squeaked again, accompanied by the sound of shifting plates. Karen was considering opening her eyes again when he asked, “You planning on faking much longer, or can you come and get your eggs now?”

Sheepishly, Karen blinked. He had his back to her, the lines of his dark shirt fitting to his broad shoulders, but she got the feeling he could sense her movement. She tried to sit up, sending pain shooting through her skull, which resulted with her rolling unceremoniously onto the cement floor shoulder-first. She hastily got to her feet, the room spinning about her for a minute before she staggered forward to grab hold of the table.

Frank had turned at the commotion, and he was at her side in an instant, the towel he’d used to handle the pan forgotten in his hand. His hand shot out almost unthinkingly to steady her, and she leaned into it instinctively before pulling back a moment later when she realized what she was doing.

“Take it easy,” he coaxed, his tone hard to decipher. She imagined he was trying to find the line between helping her and her getting angry at him for helping her. She didn’t want to be angry. She  _ was _ , but she didn’t want to be. Mostly because she wasn’t even sure why she was angry at him anymore - yes, he’d been following her, but he’d also saved her life. And she hadn’t had it under control, no matter what she’d said in the ambulance.

She avoided his eyes and instead faced the couch. She didn’t know what would show on her face if she looked at him. “I’m fine.”

The soft, irked exhalation of breath by her shoulder was enough to let her know what form his next words would take. “You gonna stop sayin’ that any time soon?”

Karen didn’t answer, though she debated repeating it anyways to piss him off. When she stayed quiet long enough, he used the hand he’d grabbed her shoulder with to gesture at the couch. “Go sit down. You shouldn’t be moving around without anything in you.”

Walking at an unhurried pace, Karen did as he instructed, settling into the couch and letting her head gently rest against the back. It smelled faintly of mothballs. She skimmed the papers spread out on the table in front of her, recognizing some of the phrasing and peering at them more intently. Some of them were articles she’d read, articles about gang violence she’d been too late to scoop up at work, but there were a few that especially caught her eye: her own. She leaned forward. He hadn’t cut them out or anything, but unless he’d been reading his horoscope, the pages he’d kept had been . . . for her.

The gruff clearing of a throat behind her prompted her to look over her shoulder. Frank held a plate of scrambled eggs, his eyes going from the papers to her without changing his expression of muted concentration. At the back of her mind, she made the observation that she’d never seen him like this before: scruffy beard, jawline softened by the morning light, barely a bruise on him now. He was almost . . . domestic. It threw her off. Apparently he felt similarly about seeing her in this light, because his gaze dropped from her face to hesitantly take her in, almost against his will.

Wordlessly, he handed her the plate and turned away. Karen glanced down at the food, then up at him. Quietly, she asked, “How long have you been following me?”

“I haven’t.” He walked back to the pan on the stove and took it over to the sink.

Karen tried to control a spark of annoyance. “Last night you said you were.”

“Keeping tabs isn’t following,” he retorted. Karen let out a huff, which he must have heard, because he kept talking to prevent her from getting a word in edgewise. “I was following you last night because I saw what was on your map and I knew you were getting yourself into trouble.”

“And how did you know that?” Karen demanded sardonically.

“Because I know who you’re going after. Because I’m going after them too, only I got it in me to do what needs to be done.” His voice got louder to be heard over the running water, carrying an edge. “Those piece of shit traffickers’ll kill you without even trying. You need to stay away from this one.”

“I don’t  _ need _ to do anything,” she shot back, noting the way his shoulders tensed. “I’m not going to just give up on this article.”

The pan clattered in the sink. Frank’s soapy hands gripped the edge of the basin, water dripping down the sides, and Karen could tell he was trying to manage his tone for the next time he spoke. “Why do you do that, huh?”

Before she could ask what, exactly, she was doing, he spun around and pinned her with a look that went right through her. Her mouth went dry. His chest rose and fell, speaking of impatience, irritation. “That thing where you keep doing the bad thing and expecting to get out okay. Because one of these days that bad thing’s gonna catch up.”

“Not if you keep following me.”

He clenched his jaw. Lowly, deliberately, he asked, “Who says I’m not the bad thing?”

The air rushed out of Karen’s lungs. She ducked her head, trying to find some meaningless barb that could hide her reaction, but she couldn’t think. It took a little while for her to find her words again, and even then her eyes stayed fixed to the eggs. She poked at them with her fork. Her voice wasn’t nearly as strong as she wished. “I already told you to leave me alone. Clearly that didn’t work.”

“Maybe that’s because you got yourself into a situation you didn’t have any business being in and you needed help.”

“I had a plan,” Karen lied, eyes flashing up. Her fork clattered on the plate.

His hands were in fists at his side. Obviously he didn’t believe her - she hadn’t been all that convincing. Minutely, he shook his head. “Shit. You don’t know when to stop, do you?”

“Neither do you.” She shifted angrily on the couch so she could look him head on. Her voice rose with every word. “They sent a tip for me.  _ Me, _ Frank. Because they wanted me. They thanked me for my goddamn tenacity, because they  _ knew _ who they were after. And you’re trying to tell me to back off? This isn’t just about the kids anymore, alright? It’s about my own damn safety, and I’m not going to let you talk me out of protecting myself. You  _ know _ I can.”

He eyed her, his mouth whispering along like it did sometimes when he was thinking. Judging from the way he was watching her, Karen guessed he hadn’t really taken the time to put the two things together yet. She must have done it sometime in her sleep, because it felt new to her: the child traffickers, los Cangrejos, had set their sights on her for some reason. Her article had crossed into her life.

Maybe it was the head injury, or the fact that she’d just woken up, but either way, the only internal response Karen could muster for the situation was:  _ Damn it, not again. _

After what felt like an eternity, Frank finally glanced away, eyes going first to the table of guns then to the floor. “It isn’t safe.”

“I’ve got leads. I’ve got a gun. And I’ve got the chance to make a real plan.” Karen waited, but he didn’t look at her. “I’ll call the cops this time around.”

The noise that came from his mouth was scornful. “Yeah, the cops’ll never screw it up. Just like the DA’ll never hide evidence or the system’ll never forget you - ”

“What would you have me do instead, huh?” Karen had to keep herself from making any more jerky motions after her eggs almost spilled into her lap. “I refuse to just . . .  _ quit. _ ”

“And that’s it, isn’t it?” he retaliated, and suddenly their gazes were locked. For a moment, all either of them did was breathe. Then, like the cork flying out of a bottle of champagne, everything spilled out at once. “You can’t see it, but I can. You wanna talk about quitting? I told you to stay away. I told you I wasn’t any good, that I couldn’t be saved, and you didn’t listen. You just couldn’t quit, and now you’re blaming me for it, like this wasn’t your fault this whole goddamn time. I told you to cut your losses.  _ You’re  _ the only who ignored me.”

His words rang in the air, along with something of an unspoken challenge:  _ Are you going to do it again? _ Without waiting another second, he grabbed his jacket off the counter and stormed out, slamming the door behind him.

Karen felt a tightness in her chest, the precursor to tears, but she swallowed it down and instead forced herself to eat her eggs as though nothing was wrong. She didn’t want to think. She didn’t want to gradually crumble apart again. She didn’t want to admit that as one-sided and simplified as his explanation of the past was, it was, in essence,  _ right _ . She’d ignored warning signs, she’d pushed where she shouldn’t have. The same thing had happened with Fisk and his mother - she’d overstepped, like she always did, in search of the truth.

Now she was sitting in it. The truth, which was that los Cangrejos were after her, Frank was after them, and she was caught somewhere in the middle without any reasonable hope of changing that.

The eggs turned to ash in her mouth, and she set them on the table, right on top of the mango article Frank had mentioned back at the bar, what felt like ages ago but was really less than a week in passing. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go at all. She wasn’t quite sure what she’d had in mind, but fighting with Frank  _ again _ definitely wouldn’t have figured into it.

If he thought there was any way she was staying out of it, he didn’t know her at all. But Karen knew that wasn’t true; that was why he’d left, because he knew if he’d stuck around they’d just argue some more. Karen had to admit, she was tired of the arguing. The unfortunate thing was that they were both stubborn to a fault, and both recognized it in each other.

She tried to sort through what she was feeling. The fact that he’d saved her life yet again was a weight on her shoulders. She didn’t like the thought that she might owe him - though Frank would never hold her to it.

She cast her thoughts back to their conversation in her apartment. He’d compared his “keeping tabs” (also known as a class D felony as criminal trespass in the third degree) to her maintaining a file on him. Sitting in the midst of his warzone, weapons and paraphernalia everywhere, she started to see some similarities. She didn’t think it excused him, but if she was constantly in a state of war, she imagined she would worry about that war bleeding into other people’s lives. With Frank . . . well, she was pretty much all he had in that regard.

More than anything, Karen hated the feeling settling under her breastbone, the faint ache of fear. What she said she could face alone and what she actually could were two very different things, and as she saw it, los Cangrejos lay somewhere in the middle of those two extremes. It didn’t do her any good to know that the only person left to help her to that end was the person she had sworn off for good less than two weeks ago.

Suddenly, Karen had to get out. She couldn’t just sit and wait for him to come back so she could address the horrible, horrible idea blooming in the back of her mind. Horrible, that is, for her plan, the one to break her vicious cycle.

She looked around quickly for her purse, eyes going over every surface and finding it on a stool by the table. In her haste, she ignored the dull, thumping headache that still plagued her when she stood up and snatched up the bag, going to the door. Her hand on the knob, she froze in momentary indecision, her mind going ridiculously, of all things, to the thought of someone breaking in once she’d left and cleaning the place out. Then she snapped herself out of it: maybe he’d stop being the shadow in her steps if all his guns were stolen.

She dialed up a taxi as she slipped out into the hall beyond, immediately seeing the exit sign above the stairs just in front of her. Frank had probably chosen the apartment specifically for the easy way out. It was certainly a help to her, at least. She practically ran down the stairs and out the back. She glanced both ways down the back alley, seeing a lone figure far to her left that, even at this distance, she could tell was Frank. She turned the other way and ducked down the alley she’d pictured from her view through the window, checking for street signs on the road beyond for the taxi to pick her up from.

She didn’t know if Frank had seen her; she kept moving just in case. Soon, a cab arrived for her, and she slid in the back, quickly muttering the Bulletin’s address to the driver. She pressed her forehead against the window as they pulled away from the curb, looking up.

Two storeys above her, a sheer curtain was pulled back, and for a second, they saw each other. Then, the curtain fell, and Karen put her back to the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter feels a little short to me but OH WELL! i'm always open to feedback (as well as praise of course because i'm Desperate for Attention)  
> honestly the comments on my updates are always so sweet (i _might_ have used one or two to prove to my mother that writing fanfic is actually validating the other day, sorry) and i'm really glad you're all still reading!  
>  this is also your friendly reminder that i ALWAYS LEAVE REPLIES to the last second because i'm a fucking walnut and i literally don't know how to reply to things even though i s2g every time i get an email saying someone commented i keel over with happiness.


	9. nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> karen heads to work, and gets some tough love.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so i was lazy and didn't realize that yesterday was sunday  
> i also forgot to get this beta'd (entirely my fault) so there's that but hopefully i didn't mess up too much!  
> i haven't replied to any comments yet bc i've been trying to limit my time on the internet recently (i think it contributed to a dissociation spell i had and i kinda want to break out of that a little bit) but to everyone who commented, thank you so much!

Karen was ten minutes late for work when the cab dropped her off.

She quickly paid the driver and got out, wondering if she should call Foggy later to drop her off at her car, which was still parked by the intersection of Orchard and Montgomery. The downside to that plan was that she would probably have to explain why she’d left it there, and she didn’t want to hear one of Foggy’s well-meaning but uninformed interventions (see: _rants_ ) about how anything dangerous should be left to the cops. After Matt disappeared, he hadn’t taken too kindly to thoughts of vigilante justice. She supposed she couldn’t begrudge him his sentiments on the subject, given how long he’d known about Matt, but she also wasn’t about to heed him.

The elevator doors opened on the office, which looked just as it always did - busy and covered in paper. Karen wondered if the news about last night had broken - _shoot-out in Hell’s Kitchen, no current suspects, police still looking for evidence._ She debated walking over to one of the older, prestiged writers to see if they were covering it. Hell, maybe she could snatch the story for herself, but she didn’t think she could stomach the thought of publishing a blatant lie - she couldn’t expose Frank, no matter how pissed she got when they met, and she couldn’t write an honest article without doing exactly that. Better for an outsider to miss the mark instead.

She headed to her office, giving out quiet smiles in way of greeting to people who called her name. A second later, she opened her door, only to see someone already sitting at her desk.

Ellison looked up at her over his glasses, then lifted his hand, which held between two fingers the tip from yesterday. And Karen knew - the news had definitely broken, and he had connected the dots. Her eyes skirted his, going from the tip to somewhere near her laptop, still sitting where she’d left it yesterday.

“Close the door,” Ellison instructed, his face betraying no more emotion than it usually did. Even Karen, who liked to think she was good at reading people, couldn’t guess at what he was going to say.

Her hand pushed the door shut uncertainly, next going to tuck her hair behind her ear as she stepped forward, so she at least had the illusion of being unconcerned. Taking on a cheerful tone, she asked, “Is there a problem?”

He didn’t move except to wiggle the slip of paper again. “You tell me.”

Karen’s breath caught in her throat. Her voice was a little thinner when she said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He flicked the paper through the air; it spiralled down to land next to her pencil cup. The spinning chair clicked as he straightened. “This morning I get a call from one of my buddies in police forensics who tells me there’s been an incident of gun violence on Montgomery, and asks me to let him know if I get any information about it from my sources. He says there was a shooting at around six, near a crashed ambulance with an empty gurney in the back. There’s no medical equipment back there. No guns. Nothing but that gurney. And he tells me so far, the only leads he has are a sample of skin from the straps, and a single blonde hair.”

Karen took this speech in silence, paying close attention to her breathing. When it seemed he wouldn’t continue, Karen cleared her throat. “Sounds terrible.”

“I guess you would know,” he replied. He just sat there, waiting.

For a second, Karen’s mind scrambled, trying to think of a way she could somehow convince him that she hadn’t been in that ambulance. Then, slowly, her thoughts came to a halt. Why even bother lying to him? Why bother attempting to hide the truth when it was sitting on the desk right in front of him? She was tired of fighting honesty.

She glanced down at her shoes and back up to her boss, who was watching her intently. “The tip was a trap.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“You can’t publish it. No one can. They can’t know I was there, they’ll - they’ll question me and I don’t want to - ”

He sighed, the sound similar to one a parent made before telling their child they weren’t in trouble. “I would never publish it, Karen.”

The use of her first name struck her, and she felt something chip away inside her. She walked forward and took a seat in the chair opposite her desk. “Where should I start?”

“At the beginning, Page, come on,” he said, as though his sudden gruff tone could erase the genuine care he’d had a second before. Neither of them were fooled.

After a few seconds to collect her thoughts, she told him what happened, going from the time she pulled up to the curb to the crash. When the bullets started flying, she hesitated, not sure how to proceed.

Ellison narrowed his eyes slightly and leaned forward. “What happened next?”

She swallowed tightly and forced a loose shrug. “They jumped out of the ambulance. The man who was talking to me, he stayed behind, but once it started to sound like it was going south, he told me he hoped we’d meet again and left in the other direction.”

“And? How did you escape?”

Karen felt her heart rate quicken. Another shrug. Her eyes skittered away from his. “Some guy helped me out of the back and I ran away.”

They both fell silent for a minute. She felt the pressure of Ellison’s gaze on her, but she refused to meet his eyes. It wasn’t convincing, she knew it. But she didn’t want it to be, not really. She wasn’t going to say it out loud, but she was done with lying to one of the few people left in her corner. Ellison was smart; he could fill in the blanks she was leaving for him.

After a while, he steepled his fingers and exhaled, as though wishing he could have it easy with her, just once. His voice was pitched low. “Some guy, huh?”

Her eyes flickered back to his, just for a second. He’d figured it out. His question now was _why_. She wet her lips. “He must have been on their trail.”

“Why were they on yours?”

Karen reached over and plucked the first tip from her pencil cup and flattened it on the desk in front of him. “I saw a crab tattoo on their leader.”

He picked it up and read it over a few times. “That doesn’t answer my question.”

“They must have known I was investigating them.”

“How?”

Karen shook her head, trying and failing to find a solid answer. “I went to a bar a week ago. I thought it might have been connected to the disappearances. Maybe they saw me there.”

He gave her a skeptical look, but decided she was telling him all she knew and let it drop. He removed his glasses and rubbed at his eyes. “Look, I know I told you to get me a story, but no story is worth dying for.”

His sentiment brought back to mind her argument with Frank, the sentiments oddly aligned. “So I’ve heard.”

Ellison put his glasses back on so he could trap her with a stern look. “I’m not joking, Page. Don’t forget what happened to Ben.”

Karen ducked her head, his words stilling her tongue before she could protest. He went on after a pause. “I want you to go to the police.”

Her moment of silence ended, and her eyes flashed. “No.”

“You were _kidnapped_ , Karen,” he retaliated. “And _some guy_ is back. I thought we decided that guy was dangerous.”

“He saved my life.” She blinked and saw his face on the back of her eyelids, under the glow of the ambulance lights. _I’m pretty sure that’s supposed to count for something._ She had been angry then, but now she was using his words. Maybe she really was a hypocrite; maybe she really was just as bad as him. She shook her head and the image cleared.

“Which is why you need to go to the police. They have your hair at the crime scene. They can place you there, and if you don’t talk to them before they do that, they can make your life difficult.”

“Do they have my fingerprints?” she demanded.

Ellison couldn’t speak for a moment. “Wh - No, they don’t, but they have your hair, your skin.”

“But all they have on file are my fingerprints. Not my DNA. They won’t be able to figure out it was me.” The look on his face made her add, “I’ll talk to them later, but right now, I have bigger things to worry about.”

“Like not getting killed by gangsters?” He cast his eyes to the ceiling at that point, like he was looking for some sort of divine intervention that could finish the argument for him. “The cops have safe-houses, they can protect you.”

Karen just shook her head, tuning him out. “I can’t do that.”

He let out an annoyed puff of air. “Then maybe you should find that guy again and ask him to keep saving your life, because at the rate you’re going, you’re gonna need it.”

The remark stilled her. There it was again: the horrible idea she’d pushed away at Frank’s apartment that morning. The premise that, if they were both going after the same target, then they might as well do it together. She had tried to reject it that morning, but with Ellison bringing it up, entirely separate from herself, she was worried that the plan actually had some merit.

A voice at the back of her mind chided, _You’re the one wanted to stop being angry. Working with him could put an end to it._ She squashed the thought before it could bloom into anything more than what she told herself it was: wishful thinking. Even if she managed to convince Frank to work with her, which, judging from their conversation earlier, he wasn’t about to do, she still had no idea what would come after. Say they were able to track down los Cangrejos. Karen had known from the beginning that she wanted to turn them over to the police the moment she was certain of their location. Frank had a different philosophy.

And, even beyond that, what was she supposed to do? She didn’t understand her connection to Frank, not its nature nor its extent, but she knew that whenever he left, she _hurt_. She didn’t want that to happen again.

It was only when Ellison cleared his throat that she realized she’d been sitting in silence for some time. She started. Faintly, she said, “I’ll think about it.”

The disquiet in his gaze was palpable. Still, it was obvious to the both of them that hashing the matter out further wouldn’t lead them anywhere. He rose from his chair and headed for the door. Karen moved around the desk to get to work, before he snapped his fingers to get her attention.

“One last thing. Brett came by for your files last week, didn’t he?”

She nodded, recalling the sinking feeling as she’d handed them off.

He bobbed his head, almost to himself. “That’s what I thought. And you didn’t log any time on the scanner.”

“I thought I would have more time with them,” Karen said, trying not to sound as dejected as the reminder made her feel.

“I thought you would have less.”

Her brow furrowed, wondering what that was supposed to mean. Was it a jab, telling her she should have made copies sooner? She was about to ask when he held up his finger and slipped out the door. Speechless, she could only wait until he returned a few minutes later carrying an office box piled with paper.

“If you refuse to break the law, then as your boss, it’s my duty to step in and do it for you,” he said, dropping the box on her desk. He scratched his head, watching as her face lit up.

She pulled it closer and skimmed the first few pages. Complete case files, possible routes and all. She grinned. “This is amazing.”

“Well, I certainly try.”

“Thank you,” she said, looking up. She hoped her tone conveyed the genuine relief she was feeling; finally something was going her way. Ideally, all she needed to do was grab her map from home and start tracing - though she doubted it would be that simple.

Ellison nodded once and ducked out the door, the situation obviously become far too touchy-feely for him. Karen took a moment to collect her thoughts, fingers toying with the front page of the report on the top of the stack. Did she really want to walk all the way back to her apartment carrying this thing around with her?

Ultimately, she figured she should just call a cab to drop her off by her car instead, which, while hurting her pockets, would save her a whole lot of walking either way. She packed her laptop in on top of the copies and used her back to hoist the heavy box. Purse slung over her shoulder, she navigated back out through the office.

Jenny, the desk girl, stopped her for a second. “Going so soon, Karen?”

“Yeah, I left some research at home,” she said, out of breath. “If Ellison asks, tell him I’ll be careful.”

“Careful with what?”

“He’ll know.” She didn’t wait around for Jenny to ask her another question, instead powering towards the elevator.

Once she was out on the street, she paused to set her box down on a nearby bench and pulled out her phone to call a cab. The morning was warm, the temperature at least a few degrees above freezing. She let her guard down as she finally felt herself beginning to relax with the good news.

The feeling persisted on the ride over, aided by the box sitting beside her. Once the cab had dropped her by her car, she set the box down on the roof of her car and went to grab her keys, just as a shadow passed over her. A curse was half out of her mouth before she looked up and groaned.

Frank stood before her, impassive. “You ran off.”

“Yeah, I did. After you made me feel so welcome, too.” She grabbed her box, though she didn’t know why. She held it against her chest like a shield. “What, were you just going to wait around all day, hoping I would come back for my car?”

“You did, didn’t you?”

She hated the way he said it, like she was predictable, like he knew her well enough that he could be three steps ahead of her at all times. Well, she’d see about that. She controlled her tone and swallowed her budding annoyance. “Tell me why you’re here.”

His tongue flicked out to wet his lips. “You left the GPS you wanted at my place.”

“Where is it now?”

“My place.”

An exasperated sound escaped Karen’s mouth. “Is this some trick to get me to come back with you? Because you can’t hide me away.”

“You’re not safe doing this alone.”

She tossed her head back, feeling like she was ramming her head into a brick wall. “You and Ellison should really trade notes sometime.”

“So the fact that there are two people telling you that what you’re doing is dangerous doesn’t faze you?” If he had expected any other response than a tilt of her head, he would have been disappointed.

“What Ellison actually said was that we should team up, but since I knew you’d never agree to that, he dropped it.” She allowed a little haughtiness into her voice. If he wanted to play it like she was predictable, then she was going to play that game right back.

Frank was scanning the street, eyes going over every car as they drove by, but when she said that, he looked to her. She wasn’t sure if the words had even surprised him; there was an aspect to his expression that said it wasn’t so far out of left field as she’d thought. The silence between them stretched on, and Karen began to get apprehensive. Something was playing out behind his eyes that she didn’t like.

Indignantly, she said, “What, you’re not actually considering it, are you?”

There was a heavy pause before he shifted and moved his eyes off again. Quietly, he countered, “And why not?”

“ _What?_ ” She glanced around the street, as though someone would pop up and give her a better explanation than _because I don’t want you to_. “This morning you were talking about how it was my fault I didn’t keep myself out of your warpath, and - and now you’re just going along with a plan that puts me directly in it?”

His expression adjusted minutely, like he resented her putting words in his mouth. “I didn’t say I was going along with it.”

“But you’re actually thinking about it.” She held the box even tighter, as though in a second it would turn into a crude voodoo doll and crush him along with it. She shouldn’t have said anything, she shouldn’t have said anything, she should have kept her mouth _shut_ \- “Is it just me, or have you stopped making sense in the last two months? Because the Frank I used to know wouldn’t have even thought twice before shutting me down.”

He took a step closer and, before Karen could stop him, he plucked the box from her hands as if it weighed nothing and put it back on the roof. He glanced at the top page, eyes skimming the text as he said, “What about you, huh? You got your good girl act, your halo that you use to try and set me straight, scrub me clean. Then you pull a gun on me and tell me you’ll unload it in me without battin’ an eye. Is that you? Is that person you, or is this?”

He knocked the box, his meaning clear. Was Karen the honest journalist or the capable killer? The fact that she couldn’t answer him frightened her.

Frank didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands; he shoved them in his pockets, but Karen could see him fidget through the leather. “People change. Maybe people were never who they said they were.”

Even though Karen knew from experience that people in his life had hidden their true nature him before, namely the Colonel, she also knew that line was surely meant for her. Frank had never apologized or shied away from his purpose, his mission. She heard the echo of his words in her ears: _What if this is just me now?_ He had always known what he was. Karen hid half of herself away in a purse in the form of a barrel and a trigger. She knew she should say something, if just to put an end to the conversation before she got dragged in any deeper, but she couldn’t get any words out.

After what felt like an eternity, he pulled his hand from his pocket to scratch his beard. He clearly wasn’t used to the feeling. He didn’t look at her. “This Ellison guy, he says we should work together. That means shared intel, shared resources. And I wouldn’t have to spend half my time tailing you trying to make sure you don’t yourself get killed.”

“No, you’d be spending your whole time doing that instead,” Karen spluttered, though she could see it was too little too late. He’d worked this through, logically and methodically, and to him, this made the most sense. If Karen was being objective, she could see the validity of the plan too. It was possible that the time had come for her to stop letting her emotions dictate whether she lived or died.

Frank was way ahead of her; he sounded about as emotionally attached as a rock. Maybe it was the beard, but Karen couldn’t figure out whether emotions had even come into play at all. They’d always been there before, even if he never spoken the words directly. He’d told her to stay away out of compassion, told her to hide out of a desire to protect. Clearly he still felt anger on a regular basis; she’d experienced its effects herself. The question remained, was that all he had left?

 _What if this is just_ him _now?_

When she didn’t say anything, he turned away and headed towards his car, which Karen saw parked a little ways down the road. Over his shoulder, he called back, “Think about it.”

Karen wanted to tell him she wouldn’t, but she had a sinking feeling that said she was probably going to do it. Though she hadn’t said it aloud, last night had scared her. No, it terrified her, and it only seemed to be the light of day that kept her from falling to pieces right there in the middle of the street. What was almost worse was that, even as she argued with him, his presence had calmed her. For the few minutes they’d spoken, the fear had left, or at least slipped away to the edges of her consciousness like clouds threatening rain beyond a distant peak in Vermont - something far away, manageable in prospect. Something she could prepare for.

The solution to half her problems was almost too easy, and she’d known it that morning, right before she shoved it aside and left for work. _Think about it_ , Frank said, but she already had.

She was about to fall down a very slippery slope.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> haha yes a very slippery slope, karen  
> again, sorry i haven't replied to comments! i know i get discouraged when i comment and people don't reply but i promise i /do/ read them all and they mean a lot to me!  
> i'm not so sure when my next-next update (after ch 10) will be. hopefully it'll be sort of on-time, but i'm moving into residence for my first year of uni in another province in two weeks time so i hope you guys will bear with me! i'll be a /little/ bit busy haha.  
> in the eternal words of youtube creators, like, comment, subscribe!  
> (by like i mean kudos)


	10. ten

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> karen gets a ride and doesn't sleep in her own bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter HAS been beta'd (because i finally got my shit together and sent it to tacohead13, my amazing beta buddy!!)  
> this chapter is also late (i finally moved in yesterday!! i am all alone !! ! woooo)

The sun had set by the time Karen had finished working on the map.

She had tried to make herself coffee earlier in the day to keep her going, but every time she took a sip she couldn’t help remembering the diner, the smell of coffee in the air and the sight of bruises purpling on Frank’s cheek. As a compromise, she nursed a cup of masala chai instead, which had caffeine and luckily didn’t remind her of him at all. The tea was cold now, placed far off to her right as she sat eyeing the map and trying to ram her head through the invisible wall in front of her.

Just as she’d morosely predicted at work, sketching out the routes hadn’t been the whole solution. Even with all the children taken during the day removed from the sample size, leaving roughly thirty-five children on the map, not all of them had possible disappearance sites listed in the reports. Some had multiple - three or four different directions they could’ve taken to walk the dog, more than one park they could have gone to - which meant unless the child in question had a witness statement that placed them somewhere else other than their house, Karen essentially had a whole lot of speculation and very little fact. Granted, a lot of their paths took them near to Churchill’s, which Karen still hadn’t written off as a possible lead, or even a hub of Cangrejo activity, but there were too many missing pieces to make anything certain. Many of their paths also went near other bars in the neighborhood, while some went the other way entirely, going deeper into the residential area instead.

She was starting to think it wasn’t as simple as she’d thought; maybe she should have come to that conclusion a little sooner, given the fact that these kids were seemingly being taken due to missed payments as punishment. She’d been working through the case as though the disappearances were a series of barely-related snatch-and-grabs, when Foggy’s call had made it clear this was organized, structured. They didn’t wait for the kids to come to them; they sought them out. And Karen still didn’t know how.

Hence, the invisible wall, and her returning headache.

It stemmed from the bump on her head. Karen wasn’t sure if she’d been concussed yesterday, though her gut instinct said no simply because she’d had a few concussions over the course of her life and this just felt like a bruise combined with a dead-end and low blood sugar (she’d forgotten to have lunch). It didn’t make her any happier about it; she was still waiting on some painkillers to kick in, and the map was swimming before her eyes.

The sound of her buzzer was a welcome interruption. Grabbing her mug so she could toss back the final mouthful of tea, she set it empty on the counter by the speaker and pressed the mic button. “Who is it?”

“Me.”

Of course that was all she needed; the single syllable was enough to make her certain of his identity. She wondered if he’d said it just to see if it would be, or because he didn’t want to say his name aloud. Probably both. She licked her lips. “I see you finally learned how normal people enter an apartment.”

“You gonna let me up or what?” There was an unspoken understanding that he didn’t like standing in the entryway, where anyone could walk up and see him waiting there for her.

She buzzed him in without reply, then unlocked her front door for him. Since she’d already been broken out of her work (or lack thereof) on the map, she decided to fix herself some dinner. She snagged a cup of instant noodles and started her kettle again.

She heard footsteps outside her door and a brief pause before a hesitant touch on the handle. Frank came in a moment later, gaze traversing the whole room until it found her in the kitchen. Quietly, he closed the door behind him and took a few steps into the place, looking around as though seeing it for the first time.

“Does it look different with someone actually inside it?” she needled, which earned her a low, “Yeah, alright, I got it,” in return.

He headed over to where her map was spread out, noting in silence the reports, now dog-eared and penned on, stacked beside it. His mouth moved a little, like he was whispering to himself, searching for the words to say next. He wasn’t finding any. She glanced at the kettle and folded her arms over her chest. “Why did you come?”

“You know why,” he replied, still surveying the map. After a second, he crouched down and pulled a pin out. Karen made a sharp noise, which he cut off with, “Police found him two hours ago behind a supermarket. Couple a’ scratches on him, nothing serious.”

Karen peered over, hoping that the pin had belonged to one of the kids who’d disappeared without a trace instead of one with witnesses, but a closer inspection showed she had no such luck. She turned back to the kettle as it dinged and prepared her noodles. As she poked at them with her fork, she said, “I haven’t decided yet.”

“We both know that’s a lie.” He straightened and tossed the pin into the open container on her desk.

Karen set her cup down, piqued. “Okay, I’ll do it. You can leave now.”

He turned to her at that, brows knit. His eyes went from her noodles to her, finally putting something together in his head. Karen didn’t know what. “I came to pick you up.”

“Pick me up?” For some reason, the thought hadn’t crossed Karen’s mind. “Why would I come with you? Just because we’re working together doesn’t mean we have to live together.”

“Really?” Frank asked, like she was the one being ridiculous. He gave her a look that reminded her of the old him, a bemused and frustrated expression that seemed to originate with her. Her breath caught in her throat, and something like hope bloomed in the pit of her stomach before she could stop it.

He was still waiting for an answer. At the moment, all she could articulate was, “Yes, really.”

Frank made his way across the kitchen to her. His bruises had all but faded, though the skin on his cheek was still tinged green under the lights. His hair looked freshly washed; for the briefest of seconds, Karen had the odd mental image of running her fingers through it, though she didn’t know where it came from. Perhaps it was because of the way it curled; Matt’s hair had always been so straight, smooth but flat and always so controlled. He would never think of growing a beard (sometimes, Karen doubted that he even needed to shave). Everything about Frank was rugged by comparison, hewn from rougher stone. 

Now she was comparing his hair to Matt’s? God, maybe she  _ was _ concussed. She bit the inside of her cheek and the thoughts cleared - hopefully never to return.

He didn’t notice her lapse. Instead, he jerked his head at the window and said, “What do you remember about the first night?”

“You mean the night I almost caught you breaking and entering?” she clarified bluntly.

He blinked back to her. “Yeah. That night.”

Karen cast her thoughts back and said, “I saw the elastic on the ground and thought you’d looked at my file, but since I couldn’t do anything about it, I went and made myself dinner, and you drove away.”

“But I didn’t.” The words didn’t compute, but it was alright; he was already starting into what he’d clearly been building to. “The night you caught me, I left. On foot, just like the first time. When I was walking away, I heard a car start up and pull out into the street. It didn’t bother me then, but after what happened yesterday, I started thinking that maybe that wasn’t where it started.”

Karen’s blood went cold. Her hand on the counter gripped painfully tight, but she kept her voice level as she asked, “If they know where I live, then why did they lure me in with the tip?”

“I dunno. Probably the attention. You’ve got neighbors, and I think they knew you wouldn’t go down easy. Snatching someone off the street miles away from where you live, that’s a lot quieter. Better chance for success.”

The breath rushed out of her lungs like she’d been punched in the stomach. She faced away, eyes latching onto the power light on the kettle. They both knew it was speculation, but Karen had been having some bad luck when it came to writing things off as coincidence lately. Her mind spun furiously, trying to recall anything else suspicious. She was afraid that she’d subconsciously chalked any and all warning signs up to Frank’s interference and had promptly forced herself to forget them.

“We’re not running the risk that I’m right about this,” he said, hushed.

Slowly, Karen nodded. Her hand waved at her research abstractedly. “You get all that. I’ll pack a bag.”

As he moved off, one thought came through clear to the forefront of her mind:  _ at least she’s acting rationally now. _ Honestly, the resistance to staying with him had collapsed within her almost the moment she’d built it up. Yes, yes, it was more rational, for a few reasons. That wasn’t the whole story. It was the same as their encounter by her car earlier: everything somehow seemed more manageable with him there, a solid and unyielding presence to protect her from anything she couldn’t protect against herself. He didn’t act like she couldn’t help herself - he acted like someone who knew, just as she did, that she had a very hard time drawing the line in the sand, and usually ended up past it. Past what she could handle alone.  _ In too deep _ .

She grabbed a few shirts, skirts, and a couple pairs of pants and shoved them into a bag. With more discretion, she also grabbed other items from around the apartment, not sure how long the case would take or what she might need. Her thoughts switched suddenly from Frank to Matt, calling to mind how Matt had treated her. Like a doll, she thought in retrospect. The comic book damsel in distress. He’d hidden the truth for so long because he thought she couldn’t bear the burden of the truth. Somewhere in his mind, it had been to protect her too; that was where Frank and Matt intersected, one of the few points they had in common. But Matt had put so much time and effort into protecting her, and what had he even really been protecting? The fragile, spun-sugar shell she’d created for him, Foggy, the rest of the world. She shouldn’t have needed to tell him that it wasn’t the real her.

Frank figured that out for himself.

“You ready?”

She tore her focus back to the present. Frank had folded the map neatly on top of the stack of reports, which he’d returned to its box. He was always a little on edge, but it seemed more pronounced than it had been a few minutes ago. Karen shoved her toothbrush and toothpaste into her bag and nodded. As they were leaving, she grabbed her laptop from her desk and locked the door behind them.

It felt surreal that a week ago, Karen had convinced herself that Frank Castle was gone forever. Now she was following him down the stairs, eyes fixed to the nape of his neck where his hair was cut short. She pictured him walking into a barber shop and sitting patiently while someone took a razor to his head. It seemed a little far-fetched, but there was no way he could have cut his hair like this alone. It felt like an encouraging sign: at least he could still do some normal things, at least he wasn’t just  _ the Punisher _ who only lived for the war.

The moment she thought it, she was ashamed. She already knew that. He wouldn’t have been keeping tabs on her if that wasn’t true; she wasn’t a part of his fight - or she hadn’t been, until yesterday - and he’d still been there. Admittedly, he had opted to break into her apartment rather than have an actual face-to-face conversation, but for all that he’d changed, there was still a part of him that was very much _Frank_.

She was so lost in her thoughts that she barely felt the cold as they started in the direction of Frank’s car. He got his keys out with one hand and unlocked it, first taking the time to dump her research in the back seat before pulling open the passenger door for her. His attention was elsewhere, scanning the other cars around them as though anticipating an attack. The moment Karen ducked her head inside, he was getting into the driver’s seat and starting the car.

He waited for her seatbelt to click before he pulled out. He said something about taking a little longer to get to his place because of the route he’d take, but Karen wasn’t listening.

She was annoyed. With every passing second since Frank’s revelation, the feeling had grown, along with her disappointment with herself. She thought she’d been smart:  _ Good for you, Karen, you figured out that Frank was in your apartment. You figured out they were los Cangrejos. You figured out the pattern. _ But she’d done exactly what they’d wanted her to do, every time. She’d followed the tip, she’d dismissed the signs as coincidence, and she’d patted herself on the back for it.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Frank glance at her when they came to a red light. She didn’t expect him to say anything, and he didn’t, until the next red light left the car quiet again. He fiddled with the vents on the dashboard so that they blew in Karen’s general direction and said, “Don’t beat yourself up about it.”

Karen bit back a blatantly false  _ I’m not _ and instead turned from the window momentarily to push the vents away. Frank didn’t say anything.

She settled her elbow on the door and rested her head on her hand. Her eyes were fixed to a point far in the distance, somewhere beyond the snow-covered city. “It’s not like there’s anyone else to blame.”

“How about the people doing it, huh? Ever think of blaming them?” The light turned green and they jolted forward again. In the back of her mind, Karen acknowledged that he was right, but it didn’t change the way she felt.

After a second, she blew out a scornful laugh. “I can’t believe I actually thought I was ahead. Like I could finally get to the truth without fucking up, like some kind of idiot. You said it yourself.”

“I never said you were an idiot.”

“You said it was my fault.” Karen had almost forgotten about that in the adrenaline rush from the early-morning shouting match itself, but suddenly his words were ringing in her ears. Frank shifted in his seat and Karen felt a spike of bitter triumph in making him uncomfortable.

He scratched his beard, and his voice, already gritty and low, was slightly muffled by his hand. “I didn’t mean that.”

Karen shot him a caustic look across the darkened car. “Sure you didn’t.”

“ _ I didn’t _ .” At first, Karen thought that was all he was going to say -  _ typical _ \- but he went on after a short pause. “I wanted you to stop. Thought it might do the job.”

“Stop  _ what _ , Frank?”

She meant it to be an easy question. A needling one, with a simple answer:  _ Stop making a mess of things, Karen. Stop getting mixed up in my war, Karen. _ It was meant to be annoying. The heavy silence that followed made her reconsider the emotion in his voice. The budding anger that had prompted the provocation fizzled out.

It felt like an eternity before Frank glanced out his window and muttered, “To stop talking.”

Karen stared at him, then shook her head and turned away. She shouldn’t have expected anything else. Darkened shopfronts rushed by outside her window and she imagined for a second the lives of the people who owned them; it felt impossible that they could just get up in the morning and go to work without wanting to give up. They could wake up and not be weary, not be isolated, not be scared.

When Karen was young, a boy up the street from her jumped into a ravine while his friends watched. The police had released an official statement saying that it had been the drugs he was on - she couldn’t remember the specifics - causing impaired judgment. His father had died the previous winter. After the accident, after what happened to her brother, Karen kept coming back to that boy’s grave in her mind. The more she did, the more she was certain that the police had been wrong.

She drove faster, she drank more, she slept later. She told everyone it was because she’d been reminded of her tragic mortal condition and wanted to live a little more. But every time she got behind the wheel, she was very aware of how easy it would be to just miss the turn and go careening over the safety barrier. It became habit to imagine what it would be like: death. Was it true, what they said? Would the pain stop? Would the guilt go away? She lived with a secret vise around her chest, and she could never take a full breath. She wanted to breath again. Sometimes she thought not breathing might be better still.

Yes. After the accident, she understood. That boy hadn’t jumped because he’d forgotten the consequences. He’d jumped because of them.

Was that what she was doing now?

Frank had said something. She could tell by the way he tilted his head. She blinked and looked over at him. “What?”

He licked his lips and tried again. “I’m sorry. For the . . .” he lifted his hand from the steering wheel momentarily as though gesturing to something ephemeral. “. . . For all of it.”

The words came out rough, clumsy. Karen realized he likely hadn’t apologized to anyone in almost a year, and the last person he’d apologized to had probably been his wife. Maybe he’d thought he’d never have to do it again. She took in his profile, almost black in the shadows from the streetlamps. He looked as unforgiving as the barrel of a gun. And yet his voice had broken, his words had trailed off like so much early morning snow.

She cleared her throat and glanced down at her lap. Her voice barely carried above the heating. “Thank you.”

The rest of the ride passed in silence.

Frank carried Karen’s research up to the apartment as she followed a few steps behind with her travel bag. With the prospect of sleep in the immediate future, her headache came throbbing back to the forefront of her mind. As Frank pulled out his keys, she swayed on her feet. He opened the door and turned to see her fading, so he grabbed her arm and led her in after him.

He walked her over to the couch and set the box of reports down on the table in front of her, covering the pile of newspapers. For a moment, he rummaged around on the kitchen table, then reappeared within her field of vision. Something about his expression clued her into the fact that he was back in army mode, going through a mental checklist. Before Karen could react, he knelt in front of her with a quiet, “I gotta do this.”

He clicked something, and she realized he was holding a penlight when the floor was suddenly illuminated. He brought the light up to her eyes, testing them individually before he turned it off and straightened. As he returned the penlight to where he’d found it, he asked, “Did you throw up today?”

Karen clenched her teeth, but immediately relaxed her jaw again when pain stabbed through the center of her skull. “No.”

“And how’s your focus?”

Karen recognized the concussion symptoms list and decided to cut him off at the pass. “My focus is fine. I just have a headache. So unless you’ve got a magical cure for those, I think I just want to go to sleep.”

There was a tense pause. Karen rested her head against the couch, waiting for him to say something. It felt like it had been at least a full minute when he finally said, “I got something for that.”

She tilted her head further back to see him watching her. It looked like he was coming to terms with something within himself, and she wondered if she could eventually convince him to tell her what it was. After a few seconds of this, he pointed to a door on the wall in front of her. “You can change in there.”

Karen lifted her head briefly to glance at the door, then looked into her travel bag as she realized she’d forgotten to bring something to sleep in. When she didn’t get up, Frank guessed at what had happened and cleared his throat. “The bed’s yours.”

Even as she made her way over to it, she wondered where he would sleep. The same place he’d slept the night before, she assumed. There was only the one bed and the couch, which was barely long enough to stretch her legs on. As she curled up on the mattress, she relegated all feelings of guilt to tomorrow.

She drifted in and out for an indeterminate amount of time as the soft incandescent lights dimmed. At one point, she heard what sounded like boiling water, but she slipped away again. The next thing she saw was Frank crouching before her, carrying a chipped orange mug.

He coaxed her up with a light touch and placed the warm mug in her hands. She felt his eyes on her as she inhaled, letting the steam wafting off the drink drift across her cheeks. Her own eyes slipped shut as she tried to identify the type of tea she was holding.

His boots creaked as he shifted. He drew in a long breath. “It’s ginger-lemon-something. My, ah, my wife used to make it. I never could take much of it, but it works. Just - wait for it to cool down before you. . . .”

She opened her eyes in time to catch his vague drinking gesture. Their gazes connected for an instant; there was an unspoken agreement between them not to mention what this meant for him. What sort of internal struggle had preceded the action, the donation of a tiny piece of his wife into her hands. Her fingers curled around the mug and held it tighter as she nodded her thanks. 

With that out of the way, he abruptly stood and headed back to the kitchen table, leaving Karen to breathe in the tea and observe as he started putting together a gun he’d been cleaning. Slowly, she started to sip at it, the ginger burning the back of her throat. His fingers worked at the cold metal tirelessly, moving from one gun to the next.  _ Click, click, slide _ . The soft metallic sounds filled the air like a lethal metronome, lulling Karen to rest.

Her last image before she fell asleep was the minute curl of Frank’s mouth as he slid the clip into a .380.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> again, sorry for the lateness! i've been trying (and failing) to make friends at uni but hopefully frosh will be more fun ?? we'll see. i haven't written the next chapter yet and idk when my next update will be (probably not next sunday tho bc i literally do have frosh activities all day) but maybe the weekend after that?? sorry guys!  
> still.... hope you enjoyed this chapter! let me know what you thought in the comments!


	11. eleven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ONE YEAR AND THREE-ODD MONTHS LATE, AN UPDATE ARRIVES  
> shit u guys SHIT the punisher is so good. who'd have thought all it took for me to update was for netflix to finally feed me some goddamn punisher content. (here's the part where you all groan in unison, "everyone, u non-updating shit")  
> this wasn't beta-d so forgive any typos!!  
> AT EVERYONE WHO HAS COMMENTED IN THE LAST YEAR AND A HALF, PLEASE FORGIVE ME FOR NOT REPLYING. i felt e x t r e m e l y guilty about the fact i didn't have an update for you guys, and the longer time went on, the worse it got. please don't hate me, i read your comments and cried for sure.  
> friends, at long last, a continuation (but not the end by far).

The next morning, Karen woke to the smell of burning.

Her eyes shot open and she jolted upright, only to see Frank by the stove, muttering angrily to himself as he flipped a burnt pancake onto the plate at his elbow. A second plate next to it already had two pancakes stacked on it, golden brown and steeping in syrup. Karen glanced at the paper grocery back on the counter nearby – it hadn’t been there when she’d gone to sleep last night. Had he already gone out for groceries? Again? She vaguely recalled him doing the same thing the last time she was here. Pancake mix didn't seem like something Frank had on-hand at all times - had he gone out specifically for her? Or maybe he just hadn't gotten enough last time. Maybe he always went early – less people around meant less opportunities for him to be recognized.

Her gaze went to the window, but the diffuse winter morning light gave no hint of the time. Deliberately making noise as she shoved the worn quilt off her legs, Karen got to her feet. Frank was working over another pancake and didn’t turn to look at her. She stretched her arms over her head, feeling her back pop, noting that she felt surprisingly well-rested for someone having just spent the night on an old mattress on the floor in the home of New York's most wanted vigilante. She stooped to pick up the mug of tea from where she’d set it on the floor last night and brought it to the sink. She couldn’t see Frank from this angle, but she could feel him behind her. Like standing beneath power lines, there was something in the air that made her aware of him even in silence.

“What time is it?” she asked, grabbing his sponge and dish soap and setting to work.

There was a pause, longer than Karen anticipated, before he answered, “Ten-thirty.”

She tossed a glance over her shoulder, a low throb radiating outwards from the bruise on the back of her head in the process. “Why didn’t you wake me sooner?”

“You needed your sleep.”

“And you didn’t?”

He didn’t reply. Karen rinsed the mug clean and set it in the plastic dishrack tucked under the cabinets. There was a box of pancake mix still open nearby. She closed it by its cardboard tabs and pushed it out of the way. She turned to face him, resting a palm on the counter and the other on her hip. He must have felt her eyes on him, but he flipped the pancake and instead moved off to the couch. Karen saw now how the GPS had been dismantled, two cords stretching from it to the laptop powered up beside it. As Frank hit a few keys, Karen asked, “Get anything from it yet?”

He shook his head once. “Battery reserve drained in the cold. Gotta fill it up before I can try.”

Karen eyed the pancake still on the stove and chose to flip it onto the plate with the burnt pancake. Frank watched her, approaching as she set the pan in the sink and turned off the stovetop. When Karen saw him reach for the burnt plate, her hand shot out to grab it before she could. Nabbing the syrup, she lied smoothly, “I like them burnt.”

Out of the corner of her gaze, she saw him narrow his eyes. Eventually, he took the good plate, but she heard him mutter all the same, “Sure you do.”

She didn’t address the comment. Frank pulled two forks and two knives out of one of the drawers and handed her a set before moving back to the couch. Slowly, Karen followed, wondering if it was an invitation to sit with him. When he sat on the far-right side, she took it as confirmation and sat down herself, putting her plate down next to the GPS and taking a bite.

The silence between them persisted for a few minutes, Karen eyeing the GPS as if she could see straight through its tangle of wires and circuit-board and plastic casings to get to the truth underneath, if only she focused hard enough. But all she saw was a mess she didn’t know how to untangle. Her knife scraped the plate harder than necessary.

Frank finished quickly. Wordlessly, he went to the sink. Over the sound of running water, he asked, “How’d you find out about these guys, anyway?”

“I needed a story.”

There was a noise from behind her that almost sounded like a laugh. “So you went and pissed off a gang.”

Despite herself, Karen allowed a smile to her lips. She chewed the end of a pancake and said, “Remember that mango article you said you liked?”

He shut off the water and put his dishes in the rack. “Something about a crop pest in India.”

“Yeah, well, my editor hated it. I haven’t run a real story in weeks. Since I . . .” She trailed off as she remembered the topic of her last successful article. Trying to keep her tone nonchalant, she finished, “Well, since I last saw you. So, I hit the streets.”

Frank was silent, either because he didn’t have anything else to say, or because he was still turning her last statement over in his mind. Karen took another bite of pancake and went on after a while. “Everything else worth talking about was already taken, so I looked into missing kids. I got a tip that helped me work it out.”

Something about that must have struck him as odd – his socks whispered against the floor as he turned and stopped, facing her. “You think it was a coincidence?”

Karen’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

Gruffly, he reiterated, “Did you get the tip before or after you started looking into the kids?”

“After, but I don’t see – ”

She glanced over her shoulder to see Frank contemplating her, his hands wrapped in a dishtowel. He tossed it haphazardly over the back of one of the kitchen chairs and moved a pace in her direction. “What would you’ve done if you got the tip first?”

Karen thought back to the tip, visualizing the slip of paper and the scrawled handwriting. _Los Cangrejos. Trafficking. Bar._ She closed her eyes and mulled it over a second. She was still in the dark about what “bar” was supposed to mean, but even without the missing kids set down in front of her, she probably would have made the same leap to Cangrejos being a name. Trafficking usually meant people, and it wouldn’t have taken her long to check missing persons. Hesitantly, she replied, “I guess . . . I guess I would’ve looked into the kids anyway.”

Frank nodded, as though this only served to prove something to himself that he had already suspected to be true. He ran a tongue over his mouth and pursed his lips. Something about what she’d said had made him angry, she could see it – the lines in his arms had gone taut, his jawline more pronounced.

The pieces fell into place.

Karen got to her feet, her pancakes forgotten on the table. “They sent the first tip too. They wanted me to find out about the missing kids.” Before he could speak, she paced to the other side of the table, where she’d put all her research last night. “When the Cangrejos had me in that ambulance, they said something about how I wouldn’t know what it was about – why they took me. Did they send the first tip to lull me into some . . . false sense of security? Why put me on their tail when they knew I could expose them?”

Frank shook his head, a clear sign that their motives were as murky to him as they were to her. He was still stiff, but Karen couldn’t figure out why he was so mad – she was the one who was supposed to be angry about this. They’d been after her from the start. Her, not him.

Karen began pulling the files out of their box and stacking them on the table. At length, Frank shifted, his fisted hands clenching, unclenching. Lowly, he said, “This got anything to do with that lawyer?”

Karen’s eyes shot to his. Of course he knew who Matt was – who Matt really was. She shouldn’t have been surprised. Was he angry about that? It was impossible to tell. She cleared her throat and returned her attention to the paper in front of her. “No. I asked them about it - “

“You _asked_ them?”

Karen’s jaw tightened with annoyance at his disapproval. She pretended he hadn’t said anything. “ – and they didn’t know who he was. Besides, I haven’t seen Matt in months, and I haven’t heard anything about his activity in Hell’s Kitchen, so I have to assume he hasn’t taken any sort of action against them yet.”

His tone was on the caustic side of disbelief as he asked, “You ever consider they were just lying to you?”

Karen’s teeth snapped together, and she shot him a glare that made him look away. “Contrary to what you may believe, _Frank_ , I’m not a goddamn idiot. I’m trying to narrow this shit down, and adding Matt into the equation isn’t helping anything line up. I know you hate him, but that’s not what’s happening here. And it sure as hell isn’t your place to be angry at him about it.”

Frank murmured something that sounded suspiciously like, “Shit, Karen,” but she was already back to her map. She unfolded it so hard she almost ripped it, and she forced her breath out through her nose, trying steady her hands. Nervous energy had sprung out of nowhere at the thought that she might have been playing into their trap since the very moment she started the case.

She pushed a hand through her hair, her fingers catching on tangles. When was the last time she’d brushed her hair? It seemed like such an inconsequential thing, but at the same time it was proof of just how much her life had been disrupted in the last few weeks. Why did they want her? Did they think she had information? But surely there were better ways of getting information. They knew she would come. They knew, and they planned on it.

Why. Why. Why.

Frank lifted his hand to rub at his mouth, scratch his beard. Karen’s eyes stayed fixed to the map in front of her. When she didn’t lift her head, he took one hesitant step in her direction, then another, then sat himself down on the couch cushion she’d vacated moments ago. His elbows rested on his knees, his hands clasped. Karen could see his thumb working on his opposite palm, an uncertain tick. The silence must have been digging at him – all Karen could hear was a rush in her ears as she tried to figure out just how long she’d been in their sights.

Frank made a noise in his throat, and Karen blinked. His voice was surprisingly rough when he spoke next. “Look, Karen, I’m – I’m sorry. This isn’t about all that . . . all that shit with Red. I just – I need to know who the scumbag is that put your name on the list. These people, they’ve been after you, on top of all that other bullshit they’ve been pulling around here. Shit, Karen, they’re – they’re messing with you. And I just – I can’t let that – ”

He paused. Karen could see his chest rising and falling, abstractly noticing that she wasn’t breathing at all. He dug his nail into his palm. “Karen, I – I can’t believe I let them get their hands on you, even for a goddamn second.”

“Why?”

The single-word question startled both of them. Karen glanced up and caught a glimpse of something in his eyes, something very different from the anger or determination she had gotten used to. It was – tender, like a fresh bruise, and her question dug its fingers into it, made it bleed. For a single, interminable second, they were frozen, one stripped bare and the other peering in, paying witness to an emotion both had forgotten he was capable of feeling. Worry. A painful, lonely, frightful desperation. Directed solely at her.

Karen forced herself to her feet, wondering why her knees didn’t shake the way her lungs shook in her chest. Her heart was in her throat – she couldn’t breathe. Hastily, she grabbed for her jacket and headed for the door. “I need some air.”

She slammed the door behind her.

 

The cold air hit her like a wall as she stepped onto the street. She cast a look at the apartment windows and headed away from its line of sight, arms crossed over her chest against the wintery breeze.

Being with Frank now was bringing back memories she had put out of her mind – memories of how it felt, rather than the memories of what had happened. She’d taken a psychology class in university, before she started using it to analyze herself and decided psychology wasn’t the path for her – there were multiple types of memory. Sensory, procedural, episodic, semantic, emotional. Episodic memories could be dealt with, parceled up, kept clean. Emotional memories were half-unconscious, starting deeper in the brain and spiralling outwards, being rationalized later into something she could put a name to.

She hadn’t wanted to name what she felt – it was easier that way, to shut herself off from what she’d lost when he’d gone away, and think only of the episodic, the simple declarative. If she couldn’t name her emotions, then how could she think of them? It didn’t take away the hurt, but it took away the regret, and the confusion, and the undeniable fact that she had felt safer with Frank by her side than she’d felt in her own home. What could she possibly name that.

Frank had been a stone. A soldier. She’d always thought – always assumed he had seen her as another one of his duties. Maybe there had been some attachment, too; she’d shown him kindness when few others had, mostly because she was familiar with the loss he was feeling. That he was still feeling. But never, in all her days, would she have guessed that she had meant as much to him then that he had meant to her.

The look in Frank’s eyes not five minutes ago said otherwise.

God. It had blindsided her. If someone had told her two months ago that the Punisher would have looked at her like . . . like she mattered, like he  _needed_ her, she would have laughed in their face. But that's what she'd seen - something raw and exposed, visceral. True. She could see his thumb against his palm in her mind's eye, see the same anxious adrenaline that had flooded her system bringing out a tick in his. Only it wasn't his - it was hers. Her energy, by right of the fact that she'd caused it. Her fear. That was perhaps what struck her most; she had been party, for the briefest instant, to the Punisher's fear. And that fear wasn't from facing down a line of enemies or the barrel of a gun. It was facing the thought of seeing her dead.

A voice at the back of her head was indignant. _If he’d really cared, he wouldn’t have left in the first place. If he’d really cared, he would have reached out._

_This changes nothing._

She pressed an icy knuckle against her lips, holding in a curse. Her eyes squeezed shut hard enough to erase the image of Frank's eyes from her mind. The voice . . . The voice was right; that wasn’t why she was here. She was here for safety alone, and she’d be gone the moment they finished the case. Which, for the Punisher, would end only one way. And then, presumably, he’d be gone too. This had been a big, messy coincidence, and the voice had said it all: it changed nothing.

She cast her gaze about the quiet street. With the sun out, children were forced out of doors – a group of at least four of them was mounting a snowman out of fresh snow on the sidewalk, their laughs striking across the asphalt to land on Karen’s ears like bells. One of them brought up a third stick, and after a brief inaudible conversation, decided a snowman could have three arms. They were entirely unaware of the darkness that pervaded this city, just as she’d once been – when she’d first arrived, blinded by the neon and boulevards and boutiques, and thought the big city wasn’t as bad as her parents had always told her it was.

She’d stopped seeing the city. She couldn’t tell when – maybe when she'd first been attacked in her apartment and found Matt and Foggy. More likely, it had been later. Somewhere between Matt’s lies and the bodies piling up from Frank’s war.

There was a job to do now. She was the only one that could do it, except for Frank, but she was also the one that needed to do it. To prove to herself that she could beat whatever this city threw at her. Lately, she’d been feeling like the city was winning.

This mission went beyond Frank, beyond whatever had been in his eyes when she’d stormed out. It couldn’t affect her decisions any more than he’d wanted it to affect his – that’s why he’d told her to stay away. So he wouldn’t have to make the decision between her and his war. This? This was her war.

She was starting to shiver; she’d been standing still too long and the cold had eaten its way down to her bones. Taking in a sharp breath and letting the cold air freeze out the pent-up anxiety in her chest, she turned back toward Frank’s building, and started walking.

 

Frank had cleaned up since she’d been out.

The GPS had been shifted to the kitchen table to make room on the coffee table for what Karen guessed were his notes. When she looked up from kicking off her shoes, she saw him hunched over on the couch, his left and right hands keeping place on two separate documents. He seemed intent to avoid picking up the conversation from where they’d let it fall.

Karen wasn’t quite on board with that. She hung her jacket on the lopsided coat hanger by the door – it must have been left here by the previous tenant, as she could hardly imagine Frank going out and buying it for himself – and planted herself on the other side of the table from him. She didn’t know what to do with her hands; eventually, she settled on crossing them, hoping it didn’t look as defensive as it felt.

She watched as a muscle jumped in his jaw, followed by the slow lift of his head. He’d firmly resettled the veneer over his features in her absence, and his eyes were devoid of anything hinting at what she’d seen in them before. It didn't change what had happened, but it made it easier. It made it easier.

Before he could speak, she opened her mouth.

“You’re not going to say anything. I’m going to talk, and you’re going to nod, and that’s going to be it.” As his mouth remained firmly shut, she took that as acquiescence and went on. “I’m only staying here as long as I’m in danger. The moment we find the people at the top of this chain, however far back we have to work it, that’s the end. This is a mission and I’m going to see it through, and then . . . then, we’re done.”

A heavy pause filled the air as she waited for him. Frank blinked, and dipped his head once, his eyes not leaving her face. Karen drew in a breath and echoed his motion with a curt nod of her own. “Good. Then let’s get to work.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whueehheue i had to reread my fic to write this and im Angsting and i'm trying to make everything keep lining up with punisher canon (note my new tags and new intentions)  
> anyone else notice...............ten-thirty  
> i'm going to go CRY i wrote this chapter in a single afternoon instead of working on my novel and y'all know i should have been reacquainting myself with axonal guidance proteins for my ding dang finals coming up instead  
> it's jonbernhthal on tumblr! find me and request gifs (i've been making sO Many gifs with all this new content Thank Jesus)


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